A Bitter/Sweet Shift in Cockroach Defenses. Everyone knows that cockroaches are the ultimate survivors, with enough evolutionary tricks up their carapaces to have thrived for 350 million years and to have completely adapted to the human species. But the nature of the adaptation that researchers in North Carolina described on Thursday in the journal Science is impressive even for such an ancient, ineradicable lineage, experts say.
Some populations of cockroaches evolved a simple, highly effective defense against sweet-tasting poison baits: They switched their internal chemistry around so that glucose, a form of sugar that is a sweet come-hither to countless forms of life, tastes bitter. The way the roach’s senses changed, experts say, is an elegant example of quick evolutionary change in behavior, and offers the multibillion-dollar pest control industry valuable insights into enemy secrets, perhaps even revealing some clues for the fight against malaria-carrying mosquitoes, which are far more dangerous to human health than roaches. Untouched water as old as 2.6 billion years is found: Don't drink it.
Nearly 1.5 miles beneath Earth's surface, scientists have discovered pockets of water that have remained in isolation for more than a billion years. What you see in that picture above is probably some of the oldest water on the planet, and scientists say it could be teeming with microscopic life. The ancient water bubbling up from the floor of a zinc and copper mine near Timmins in Canada's Ontario province looks crystal clear, but it would not make a cool refreshing drink. Scientists say it is warm to the touch and much saltier than seawater. The water is also rich in dissolved hydrogen and methane gas as well as noble gases and their isotopes.
How does world's oldest water taste? 'Terrible.' The chemical reactions of the gases could build up enough energy to support life that has been hidden from the sun for more than a billion years, a team of researchers report in a study published in the journal Nature. "This knocked my socks off," Sherwood Lollar told the Los Angeles Times. Baby’s life saved with groundbreaking 3D printed device from University of Michigan that restored his breathing.
Ann Arbor, Mich. – Every day, their baby stopped breathing, his collapsed bronchus blocking the crucial flow of air to his lungs. April and Bryan Gionfriddo watched helplessly, just praying that somehow the dire predictions weren’t true. “Quite a few doctors said he had a good chance of not leaving the hospital alive,” says April Gionfriddo, about her now 20-month-old son, Kaiba. “At that point, we were desperate. Anything that would work, we would take it and run with it.” They found hope at the University of Michigan, where a new, bioresorbable device that could help Kaiba was under development. Kaiba’s doctors contacted Glenn Green, M.D., associate professor of pediatric otolaryngology at the University of Michigan. On February 9, 2012, the specially-designed splint was placed in Kaiba at C.S. “It was amazing. Green and Hollister were able to make the custom-designed, custom-fabricated device using high-resolution imaging and computer-aided design. About C.S.
Human cloning breakthrough raises hopes for treatment of Parkinson's and heart disease - Science - News. For the first time, researchers have unequivocally created human embryonic stem cells using the cloning technique that led to the birth of Dolly the sheep. However, unlike Dolly, the human embryos were destroyed when their stem cells were extracted. The scientific milestone, which comes 17 years after the birth of Dolly, represents a major turning point in human cloning research which could now lead to new tissue-transplant operations for a range of debilitating disorders, such as Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, heart disease and spinal cord injuries. However, the breakthrough will also raise serious ethical concerns about the creation of human embryos for medical purposes and the possible use of the same technique to produce IVF embryos for couples wanting their own cloned babies - which is currently illegal in the UK.
Generating a plentiful supply of embryonic stem cells from a patient's own skin cells has been one of the holy grails of medical science. Beating heart cells. Meet Eb0z, The Guy Who Claims To Have Hacked Pakistan’s Web (And 89,000 Other Sites) It all started with a score that needed to be settled. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote up some news about how various, high-profile sites in Pakistan and Romania were getting defaced by hackers. I did a little digging around to see who might have been behind the events, and then wrote that up in the posts. Apparently, I didn’t dig deep enough to get the whole story. Over the weekend, someone called eboz, the same name as the hacker behind the Pakistan spate of attacks, got in touch.
He wanted me to know, first and foremost, that he wasn’t responsible for 3,000 site hacks; but closer to 90,000, most performed under a different name, KriptekS, with more listed here (this latter group he calls his “special-0wn4geZ”). “Try not to be stupid next time, Ingrid,” he advised. As long as I had his ear, I decided to see if he would talk to me a bit more. Eboz is a self-styled hacker’s hacker and focuses mostly on gaining root access to servers and sometimes defacing them. Why do you deface? Mainly. Plasmyd. Dropbox in Space! Dropbox / 18 Comments Posted by Drew Houstonon April 09, 2014 Today, we launched Mailbox for Android, turned on new Dropbox for Business features, and introduced the world to Carousel, our new gallery app. These experiences are just a first step towards making Dropbox a home for life. And today, we’re thrilled to announce three amazing additions to our leadership team to help us get there.
We’re thrilled to promote Sujay Jaswa to be our CFO. Sujay was our first business executive, and has created and led the business side of Dropbox since joining in 2010. He’s been responsible for managing our fundraising, driving key partnerships, and scaling the business teams to several hundred people globally. When we embarked on our search for a CFO, we were looking for someone to lead our finance function and also be our partner for the company’s most important decisions. Dennis Woodside is joining the Dropbox family as our new COO. Finally, we’re proud to welcome Dr.
Welcome aboard! Friday, March 7. New Web Order - Nik Cubrilovic Blog. Leap Motion. How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking | Gadget Lab. In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.
In many ways, this was all my fault. My accounts were daisy-chained together. Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location. Those security lapses are my fault, and I deeply, deeply regret them. But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple’s and Amazon’s. This isn’t just my problem. I realized something was wrong at about 5 p.m. on Friday. Lulz. “Wait. “Mr. Hackers backdoor the human brain, successfully extract sensitive data. With a chilling hint of the not-so-distant future, researchers at the Usenix Security conference have demonstrated a zero-day vulnerability in your brain. Using a commercial off-the-shelf brain-computer interface, the researchers have shown that it's possible to hack your brain, forcing you to reveal information that you'd rather keep secret.
As we've covered in the past, a brain-computer interface is a two-part device: There's the hardware -- which is usually a headset (an EEG; an electroencephalograph) with sensors that rest on your scalp -- and software, which processes your brain activity and tries to work out what you're trying to do (turn left, double click, open box, etc.) BCIs are generally used in a medical setting with very expensive equipment, but in the last few years cheaper, commercial offerings have emerged. For $200-300, you can buy an Emotiv (pictured above) or Neurosky BCI, go through a short training process, and begin mind controlling your computer. Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram.
A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times. The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0). To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary.
To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses.