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(credit: SHANLISS_SNAPPER)

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) gives pigs a fever and cough, but it costs American swine farmers over $600 million a year. Vaccines have been ineffective at fighting it, as has breeding pigs to be resistant. Last year, researchers in the Midwest used CRISPR-Cas9-based gene engineering to generate pigs that lack CD163, the protein that PRRS uses to infect its target cells in pigs. Now, the same team just demonstrated that the pigs lacking the receptor don't get sick when exposed to PRRS.

The three resistant pigs had deletions in both copies of their CD163 genes and thus made no CD163 protein. This lack did not seem to affect them in any adverse way. After weaning, these three and eight wild-type piglets were exposed to the strain of PRRS virus usually used in experimental infections, which happens to be a pretty virulent one.

The pigs were generated at the University of Missouri but infected at Kansas State University—the Kansans who did the infecting didn't know which pigs were which, making this what's called a blinded experiment. All of the pigs were kept in the same pens, so even if the initial infection didn't take, the pigs had plenty of opportunities to get sick from each other.

(credit: Marjan Lazarevski)

None of us can avoid the effects of aging, though many of us try in various ways, through cosmetics or nutrition and wellness products. Though these things may slow or disguise the progression of age-related effects, the health-related issues of aging remain. For the most part, researchers have had little luck developing treatments to postpone, ameliorate, or prevent the accumulation of diseases throughout one’s life. People may be living longer, but it's often with a reduced quality of life due to age-related diseases.

Recently, researchers have begun to explore the basic mechanisms of aging from the cellular level to the systemic level in order to develop new strategies to prevent age-related issues and better understand them. Last week's edition of Science took a look at some of the results.

At the cellular level

Aging represents the failure to balance genetic programs for survival and reproduction once an individual has survived beyond the age of peak reproductive fitness. Though all of our cells are important, some cells are more important than others. In particular, scientists have focused their attention on understanding how aging affects a specific, critical population of our cells—stem cells. Stem cells are only a small portion of our cells, but they are able to replicate themselves indefinitely and are able to transform into specific cell types (such as a bone cell or heart cell) based on external cues.

Enlarge / An payload that's been modified so it can't be misused. Malicious hackers are using it to perform an object injection attack that leads to a full remote command execution. (credit: Sucuri)

Attackers are actively exploiting a critical remote command-execution vulnerability that has plagued the Joomla content management system for almost eight years, security researchers said.

A patch for the vulnerability, which affects versions 1.5 through 3.4.5, was released Monday morning. It was too late: the bug was already being exploited in the wild, researchers from security firm Sucuri warned in a blog post. The attacks started on Saturday from a handful of IP addresses and by Sunday included hundreds of exploit attempts to sites monitored by Sucuri.

"Today (Dec 14th), the wave of attacks is even bigger, with basically every site and honeypot we have being attacked," the blog post reported. "That means that probably every other Joomla site out there is being targeted as well."

Onward... to a largely ignored launch!

Nintendo doesn't publish all that many Wii U games these days, but you can usually expect to hear a lot about the few games it does release; you may have seen the marketing blitzes for titles like Super Mario Maker or Xenoblade Chronicles X this holiday season. But last Friday's release of Devil's Third in North America was so quiet that probably only the most obsessive of Nintendo fans even realized the game exists.

Devil's Third has a storied and tumultuous development history. The game is the brainchild of Tomonobu Itagaki, the famed Tecmo developer known for series such as Dead or Alive and the 3D revival of the Ninja Gaiden series. After leaving Tecmo in 2008, Itagaki formed the independent Valhalla Game Studios with some other departing members of his Team Ninja development studio. Devil's Third was Valhalla's first announced game, revealed way back in 2010 as an Xbox 360, PS3, and Windows PC title. The game represented a departure from Itagaki's usual style, focusing on third-person shooting and online play rather than local brawling.

The game went through a number of changes in gameplay style and underlying technology over the years, according to reports at the time. But development dragged on for so long that its original publisher, THQ, actually went out of business in 2013 before releasing the unfinished game. Nintendo—perhaps seeing an opportunity to pick up an M-rated exclusive with a big name behind it—obtained the publishing rights and announced the game as a Wii U exclusive in a June 2014 "Digital Event."

Enlarge (credit: @coldhakca)

Twitter has warned dozens of users that their account data may have been targeted by state-sponsored hackers.

In e-mails sent to security researchers, journalists, and activists over the past few days, Twitter officials said there's no evidence the attacks were successful. Still, the messages said Twitter officials are actively investigating the possibility that the accounts were breached. Dozens of users have reported receiving the advisory, with this list showing 36 people and this one listing 32 users.

"As a precaution, we are alerting you that your Twitter account is one of a small group of accounts that may have been targeted by state-sponsored actors," one e-mail warned. "We believe that these actors (possibly associated with a government) may have been trying to obtain information such as e-mail addresses, IP addresses and/or phone numbers."

Samsung's Galaxy S6. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

The Wall Street Journal has posted some tantalizing new details about Samsung's upcoming flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S7. The report paints a picture of the S7 as being a minor upgrade to the major revamp that was the Galaxy S6 but with a few new features to entice upgraders.

The biggest news, according to the Journal, is that the S7 and S7 Edge will feature a "pressure-sensitive display" which the report notes "will be similar to that offered by rival Apple Inc. on the iPhone 6s earlier this year." Apple's 3D Touch hardware launched with the iPhone 6s, Apple rolled out support to the core OS interface and packed-in apps, and tons of third-party apps (even Google) added support for it. Samsung lacks the sway over an app ecosystem that Apple has, so while it can update the core OS interface, we doubt many other apps will support the pressure-sensitive display, as was the case with Samsung's early foray into fingerprint readers.

In the "not surprising" category, the Journal said that Samsung will again be releasing two versions of the phone—the flat-screened Galaxy S7 and the curved-screened Galaxy S7 Edge—and that both devices will look "will look largely similar" to their predecessors. The report said the phone is slated to launch in March with an unveiling at Mobile World Congress, which is similar to the Galaxy S6 timeframe, and it will come with a USB Type C-port, which is quickly becoming a standard for new devices.