Tag: science

Smoking Mothers May Alter the DNA of Their Children

sciencehabit (1205606) writes “Pregnant women who smoke don’t just harm the health of their baby—they may actually impair their child’s DNA, according to new research. A genetic analysis shows that the children of mothers who smoke harbor far more chemical modifications of their genome — known as epigenetic changes — than kids of non-smoking mothers. Many of these are on genes tied to addiction and fetal development. The finding may explain why the children of smokers continue to suffer health complications later in life. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Smoking Mothers May Alter the DNA of Their Children

Newly Discovered Virus Widespread in Human Gut

A newly discovered virus has been found by a San Diego State University team to live inside more than half of all sampled human gut cells sampled. Exploring genetic material found in intestinal samples, the international team uncovered the CrAssphage virus. They say the virus could influence the behaviour of some of the most common bacteria in our gut. Researchers say the virus has the genetic fingerprint of a bacteriophage – a type of virus known to infect bacteria. Phages may work to control the behaviour of bacteria they infect – some make it easier for bacteria to inhabit in their environments while others allow bacteria to become more potent. [Study lead Dr. Robert] Edwards said: “In some way phages are like wolves in the wild, surrounded by hares and deer. “They are critical components of our gut ecosystems, helping control the growth of bacterial populations and allowing a diversity of species.” According to the team, CrAssphage infects one of the most common types of bacteria in our guts. National Geographic gives some idea why a virus so common in our gut should have evaded discovery for so long, but at least CrAssphage finally has a Wikipedia page of its own. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Newly Discovered Virus Widespread in Human Gut

UV-Powered Blood Test Could Make Universal Cancer Detection Possible

Early detection is the best tool to fight cancer, but biopsies can be painful and inconclusive. New research shows a simple blood test can detect cancers by blasting white blood cells with UV and seeing how they respond. Painless, universal cancer detection could be a drop of blood away. Read more…

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UV-Powered Blood Test Could Make Universal Cancer Detection Possible

Apple Acquires "Pandora For Books" Booklamp For $15 Million

Nate the greatest (2261802) writes with news made public Friday that Apple has acquired a little known ebook company called Booklamp, a small Idaho-based ebook startup which is best known for the Book Genome Project. First shown off to the world in 2008, this project was conceived by Booklamp founder and CEO Aaron Stanton as a way of analyzing a book’s pacing, dialog, perspective, genre, and other details in order to identify a book’s unique DNA. Booklamp has been using the tech to sell various services to publishers, tech companies, and the like, but Booklamps’s existing contracts were apparently cancelled earlier this year. According to one industry insider the deal happened in April, but Apple managed to keep the news under wraps until just last night. No one knows for sure how Apple will use booklamp but there is speculation that Apple could launch an ebook subscription service similar to the week-old Kindle Unlimited, or they could just use Booklamp to drive ebook recommendations in what some are speculating is the world’s second largest ebookstore. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple Acquires "Pandora For Books" Booklamp For $15 Million

Social Security Administration Joins Other Agencies With $300M "IT Boondoggle"

alphadogg (971356) writes with news that the SSA has joined the long list of federal agencies with giant failed IT projects. From the article: “Six years ago the Social Security Administration embarked on an aggressive plan to replace outdated computer systems overwhelmed by a growing flood of disability claims. Nearly $300 million later, the new system is nowhere near ready and agency officials are struggling to salvage a project racked by delays and mismanagement, according to an internal report commissioned by the agency. In 2008, Social Security said the project was about two to three years from completion. Five years later, it was still two to three years from being done, according to the report by McKinsey and Co., a management consulting firm. Today, with the project still in the testing phase, the agency can’t say when it will be completed or how much it will cost. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Social Security Administration Joins Other Agencies With $300M "IT Boondoggle"

GOG.com Announces Linux Support

For years, Good Old Games has made a business out of selling classic PC game titles completely free of DRM. Today they announced that their platform now supports Linux. They said, We’ve put much time and effort into this project and now we’ve found ourselves with over 50 titles, classic and new, prepared for distribution, site infrastructure ready, support team trained and standing by … We’re still aiming to have at least 100 Linux games in the coming months, but we’ve decided not to delay the launch just for the sake of having a nice-looking number to show off to the press. … Note that we’ve got many classic titles coming officially to Linux for the very first time, thanks to the custom builds prepared by our dedicated team of penguin tamers. … For both native Linux versions, as well as special builds prepared by our team, GOG.com will provide distro-independent tar.gz archives and support convenient DEB installers for the two most popular Linux distributions: Ubuntu and Mint, in their current and future LTS editions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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GOG.com Announces Linux Support

Dropbox Head Responds To Snowden Claims About Privacy

First time accepted submitter Carly Page writes When asked for its response to Edward Snowden’s claims that “Dropbox is hostile to privacy”, Dropbox told The INQUIRER that users concerned about privacy should add their own encryption. The firm warned however that if users do, not all of the service’s features will work. Head of Product at Dropbox for Business Ilya Fushman says: “We have data encrypted on our servers. We think of encryption beyond that as a users choice. If you look at our third-party developer ecosystem you’ll find many client-side encryption apps….It’s hard to do things like rich document rendering if they’re client-side encrypted. Search is also difficult, we can’t index the content of files. Finally, we need users to understand that if they use client-side encryption and lose the password, we can’t then help them recover those files.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Dropbox Head Responds To Snowden Claims About Privacy

Intel Launches Self-Encrypting SSD

MojoKid writes: Intel just launched their new SSD 2500 Pro series solid state drive, the follow-up to last year’s SSD 1500 Pro series, which targets corporate and small-business clients. The drive shares much of its DNA with some of Intel’s consumer-class drives, but the Pro series cranks things up a few notches with support for advanced security and management features, low power states, and an extended management toolset. In terms of performance, the Intel SSD 2500 Pro isn’t class-leading in light of many enthusiast-class drives but it’s no slouch either. Intel differentiates the 2500 Pro series by adding support for vPro remote-management and hardware-based self-encryption. The 2500 Pro series supports TCG (Trusted Computing Group) Opal 2.0 features and is Microsoft eDrive capable as well. Intel also offers an administration tool for easy management of the drive. With the Intel administration tool, users can reset the PSID (physical presence security ID), though the contents of the drive will be wiped. Sequential reads are rated at up to 540MB/s, sequential writes at up to 480MB/s, with 45K – 80K random read / write IOps. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel Launches Self-Encrypting SSD

Firefox 31 Released

An anonymous reader writes Mozilla has released version 31 of its Firefox web browser for desktops and Android devices. According to the release notes, major new features include malware blocking for file downloads, automatic handling of PDF and OGG files if no other software is available to do so, and a new certificate verification library. Smaller features include a search field on the new tab page, better support for parental controls, and partial implementation of the OpenType MATH table. Firefox 31 is also loaded with new features for developers. Mozilla also took the opportunity to note the launch of a new game, Dungeon Defenders Eternity, which will run at near-native speeds on the web using asm.js, WebGL, and Web Audio. “We’re pleased to see more developers using asm.js to distribute and now monetize their plug-in free games on the Web as it strengthens support for Mozilla’s vision of a high performance, plugin-free Web.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Firefox 31 Released