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Single course of antibiotics can mess up the gut microbiome for a year

(credit: Global Panorama/Flickr ) In a battle against an infection, antibiotics can bring victory over enemy germs. Yet that war-winning aid can come with significant collateral damage; microbial allies and innocents are killed off, too. Such casualties may be unavoidable in some cases, but a lot of people take antibiotics when they’re not necessary or appropriate. And the toll of antibiotics on a healthy microbiome can, in some places, be serious, a new study suggests. In two randomized, placebo-controlled trials of healthy people, a single course of oral antibiotics altered the composition and diversity of the gut microbiome for months, and in some cases up to a year. Such shifts could clear the way for pathogens, including the deadly Clostridium difficile . Those community changes can also alter microbiome activities, including interacting with the immune system and helping with digestion. Overall, the data, published Tuesday in the journal mBio , suggests that antibiotics may have more side effects than previously thought—at least in the gut. In the mouth, on the other hand, researchers found that microbial communities fared much better, rebounding in weeks after antibiotic treatments. The finding raises the question of why the oral microbiome is less disturbed by drugs. It could simply be because of the way that antibiotics, taken orally, circulate through the body. Or, it could imply that oral microbiomes are innately more resilient, a quality that would be useful to replicate in microbial communities all over the body. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Single course of antibiotics can mess up the gut microbiome for a year

Chrome to end support for Windows XP, Vista, and OS X 10.8 on April 2016

If you’re on an older operating system, your Chrome could stop getting updates in just a few months. Google’s official Chrome Blog announced it will be ending support for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X 10.6, 10.7, and 10.8 in April 2016. Browsers on those operating systems will continue to work, but they will stop getting updates from Google. For Windows XP, this is yet another stay of execution from Google, mirroring Microsoft’s continually extended support for the OS that just won’t die. Chrome support for XP was originally stated to end along with Microsoft’s in April 2014. Google then extended that to ” at least April 2015 ,” then all of 2015 , and now it’s going to hang around for the next five months. On the Mac side of things, Apple usually supports its three newest operating systems. So official support for 10.8 ended when 10.11 El Capitan was released, and 10.6 and 10.7 have long been put to rest by Apple. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chrome to end support for Windows XP, Vista, and OS X 10.8 on April 2016

$635 poop pills cure deadly gastrointestinal infection

(credit: Ana C./ Flickr ) The country’s first stool bank , OpenBiome, is now selling capsules of fecal matter to treat life-threatening Clostridium difficile , or C. diff, infections. The $635 pill-based therapy, a type of fecal transplant, is highly effective against the difficult-to-treat gastrointestinal infection, according to results of a pilot study. A single dose, which includes a whopping 30 pills, cured 70 percent of patients. A second dose bumped the success rate up to 94 percent. The treatment, currently being sold only to doctors, may offer an easier alternative to other effective fecal transplant routes, namely  colonoscopies, nasal tubes, and enemas . Scientists have known for years that fecal transplants in general are highly effective against C. diff infections, which can be extremely difficult to cure. The infection can cause severe, recurring diarrhea. It can be resistant to antibiotic treatments, and sometimes it turns deadly. In the US, C. diff causes more than 450,000 infections a year, leading to about 15,000 deaths . Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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$635 poop pills cure deadly gastrointestinal infection

AT&T expands gigabit fiber to 23 cities starting at $70 (or $110)

AT&T’s updated GigaPower coverage map. (credit: AT&T ) AT&T yesterday announced expansions of its gigabit fiber Internet service into parts of 23 cities and towns. The new markets are mostly in the suburbs of big cities where AT&T already offered its fastest broadband. For example, AT&T previously brought its “U-verse with GigaPower” service to Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Nashville, and Orlando. The expansion this week brings the service into a bunch of cities and towns within the larger metro areas. Pricing for the Internet-only 1Gbps package is either $70 a month or $110 a month, depending on where you live. As we’ve reported previously, AT&T tends to match Google Fiber’s $70 pricing , but not in areas where Google isn’t offering service. Besides that, AT&T’s lowest price in each city requires customers to opt into “Internet Preferences ,” which gives the company permission to examine each customer’s Web traffic in order to serve personalized ads. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T expands gigabit fiber to 23 cities starting at $70 (or $110)

Microsoft considers blocking SHA-1 certificates after cost of collisions slashed

Microsoft may phase out support for TLS certificates that use the SHA-1 hashing algorithm as early as June 2016 . The decision comes in the wake of recent calculations that suggest generating collisions is quicker and cheaper than previously anticipated. SHA-1 is a hash algorithm, used to derive a 128-bit value from an arbitrary input. Its intent is for collisions—different inputs that hash to the same 128-bit value—to be hard to generate. As compute power has steadily grown over the years, it becomes quicker and cheaper to generate collisions. It was previously projected by Bruce Schneier , based on the observed growth of compute power, that creating SHA-1 collisions would be within reach of criminals by 2018 at a cost of about $173,000. On this basis, Microsoft intended to cease supporting the use of new SSL/TLS certificates using SHA-1 on January 1, 2016 and all SHA-1 SSL/TLS certificates on January 1, 2017. The new cost and performance estimates, however, suggest that the cost is both drastically lower—$75,000 to $120,000—and that the compute resources are immediately available through cloud services such as Amazon EC2. This has given browser vendors little option but to reconsider the previous 2017 timetable for retiring support of SHA-1. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft considers blocking SHA-1 certificates after cost of collisions slashed

First-of-its-kind gene-edited cells treat baby’s leukemia

(credit: Sharon Lees/Great Ormond Street Hospital ) With genetic tweaks and snips, researchers created cancer-busting immune cells that, so far, seem to have wiped out a life-threatening form of leukemia in a one-year-old girl. The new cells are one-size-fits-all, beating out earlier cell-based cancer therapies that required custom engineering of each patient’s own immune cells. If proven effective in more trials, the new, generic cells could offer an easy, off-the-shelf treatment for life-threatening forms of leukemia. “It is something we’ve been waiting for,”  said Stephan Grupp, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved with the research. Previous methods requiring engineering cells, specifically T cells, from every single patient could be slow, costly, and impossible in some patients with low T cell counts. “The innovation here is gene-editing T cells so that one person’s T cells could be given to another even if they are not a donor match,” he said in a statement. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First-of-its-kind gene-edited cells treat baby’s leukemia

Google engineer leaves scathing reviews of dodgy USB Type-C cables on Amazon

(credit: Andrew Cunningham) One particularly conscientious Google engineer, Benson Leung, is currently on an unusual mission: he’s slowly working his way through a bunch of USB Type C cables and adaptors stocked by Amazon, to check whether they are actually up-to-spec and capable of charging his Chromebook Pixel. First things first: of the ten USB Type C products that Leung has reviewed, only three of them were fully specs-compliant and capable of charging his Pixel. The three good cables (Belkin, iOrange-E, Frieq) were invariably more expensive (about £15/$20) than the seven duff ones (£6/$10). Obviously there may be some cheap cables that do fulfil the full USB Type C specification, but Leung hasn’t found one yet. One of the offending micro-USB-to-Type-C adaptors that lacks the necessary hardware to comply with the Type C 1.1 spec. The USB Type C 1.1 specification allows for power delivery of up to 3A, which is enough juice to charge a laptop like the Chromebook Pixel. Previous USB specs, though, only allowed for power delivery of between 900mA and 1.5A. According to Leung, the problem is mostly related to how the cables deal with going from older Type A or Micro/Mini connectors to the new Type C connector. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google engineer leaves scathing reviews of dodgy USB Type-C cables on Amazon

MPAA shuts down major torrent sites, including Popcorn Time

The site that provides much of the content for illegal movies shown on the “Popcorn Time” app,  PopcornTime.io, has been shut down after the Motion Picture Association of America won court orders in Canada and New Zealand. “Popcorn Time and YTS are illegal platforms that exist for one clear reason: to distribute stolen copies of the latest motion pictures and television shows without compensating the people who worked so hard to make them,” said MPAA Chairman Sen. Chris Dodd in a statement (PDF) . According to the piracy news site TorrentFreak, YTS stopped functioning  in mid-October. Now the MPAA has taken credit for that and the PopcornTime.io shutdown. MPAA sued three “key Canadian operators” of PopcornTime.io on October 9 in Federal Court in Canada. PopcornTime.io was said by its operators to be the “official” PopcornTime fork. On October 16, the MPAA’s member studios obtained an injunction ordering the site to shut down. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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MPAA shuts down major torrent sites, including Popcorn Time

Changing the Earth’s climate by covering the deserts with solar panels

Solar panels in Chile’s Atacama desert. (credit: OPIC.gov ) Currently, the Earth’s inhabitants are consuming about 17.5TeraWatts of power each year. It’s estimated that an aggressive rollout of solar panels could generate at least 400TW, and possibly much, much more. But that would involve paving over a lot of the Earth’s surface with solar panels, in many cases covering relatively reflective sand with dark black hardware. Could this have its own effects on the climate? The answer turns out to be remarkably complex. That’s in part because the panels don’t simply absorb the energy of the light—a fraction of it gets converted to electricity and shipped elsewhere. A team of US and Chinese scientists decided to account for all of this and found out that massive solar installations would cause changes in the climate, but the changes would be minor compared to what we’d see from continued greenhouse gas emissions. The authors created a number of scenarios to tease out the influence of the panels, and they used climate models to examine the changes they drove. The first method involved covering most of the Earth’s deserts and urban areas with solar panels (this would, of course, lead to a ridiculous overproduction of electricity). In a second, the power harvested by these panels was then sent to urban areas and dissipated as heat. Finally, for a somewhat more realistic view, they simply covered most of the deserts of Egypt with panels. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Changing the Earth’s climate by covering the deserts with solar panels

How to use Tor Messenger, the most secure chat program around

(credit: Samuel Huron ) On Thursday, the Tor Project released its first public beta of Tor Messenger , an easy-to-use, unified chat app that has security and cryptography baked in. If you care about digital security, you should ditch whatever chat program you’re using and switch to it right now. The app is specifically designed to protect location and routing information ( by using Tor ) and chat data in transit (by using the open source Off-The-Record, or OTR, protocol ). For anyone who has used a similar app (like Pidgin or Adium), Tor Messenger’s interface will be fairly self-explanatory, but there are two notable quirks. First, by default, it will not allow you to send messages to someone who doesn’t support OTR—but there is an option to disable that feature. (We’ll get to that in a minute.) Second, unlike Pidgin or Adium, Tor Messenger cannot log chats, which is handy if you’re privacy-minded. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How to use Tor Messenger, the most secure chat program around