Month: February 2016

This is a transmission electron micrograph (TEM) of Zika virus, which is a member of the family Flaviviridae. Virus particles are 40 nm in diameter, with an outer envelope, and an inner dense core. (credit: CDC)

Two months after a 68-year old British man became sick with Zika virus, traces of the germ lingered in his semen, researchers reported Friday.

The finding suggests that the mosquito-spread virus may unexpectedly hang around in the body for much longer than symptoms appear, which typically only last for about a week. (Though only a quarter or so of people infected with Zika experience any symptoms.) The viral loitering may up the chances of transmission, the authors speculate.

The British man was infected with the virus while traveling to French Polynesia in 2014. Follow-up testing of the man found traces of viral genetic material in his semen 27 days and 62 days after he first reported symptoms of the infection, which included fever, lethargy, and a rash. The findings appeared Friday in Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Take a 64-bit iOS device—iPhone 5S or newer, iPad Air or newer, iPad Mini 2 or newer, sixth generation iPod touch or newer—laboriously set its date to January 1, 1970, and reboot. Congratulations: you now have a shiny piece of high-tech hardware that's stuck at the boot screen, showing nothing more than the Apple logo... forever.

Posted on Reddit and subsequently demonstrated on YouTube, it appears that iOS has a rather embarrassing software flaw. Redditors testing the bug have found themselves with unusable phones, and there are reports that vandals have been resetting the clocks of display devices in Apple stores.

So far, taking advantage of this bug requires a few minutes of physical access, as it takes a while to wind the date back 46 years in the settings app. There is concern that Wi-Fi devices could be vulnerable to malicious data from NTP (network time protocol) servers. NTP is used by many operating systems to set the time and date of a device, and its data is both unencrypted and unauthenticated, making spoofing relatively straightforward. NTP clients should not generally change the time and date by such large amounts, so this may not be an issue, but iOS's behavior in this regard is currently unknown.

(credit: Ecig Click)

WASHINGTON—It’s widely assumed that swapping cigarette puffing for vapor huffing is better for health—after all, electronic cigarettes that heat up and atomize a liquid concoction can skip all the hazards of combustion and smoke. But researchers are still scrambling to understand the health effects of e-cig use (aka vaping) and to track down the variable and undisclosed components of those vaporized mixtures. The most recent data hints at unexpected health effects unique to e-cig use.

After comparing genetic information swabbed from the noses of smokers, vapers, and non-users of both, researchers found that smoking suppresses the activity of 53 genes involved in the immune system. Vaping also suppressed those 53 immune genes—along with 305 others. The results were presented Friday at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.

Though research on the significance of that gene suppression is still ongoing, the initial results suggest that e-cig users may have compromised immune responses, making them potentially more vulnerable to infections and diseases.

Researcher Jean F. Ruiz-Calderon, collecting environmental data. (credit: Humberto Cavallin)

If you live in a city, each room of your house has its own distinct broth of microbes splattered all over its walls—most of it from your skin, mouth, and gut. But if you live in a rural area, this broth contains a lot more microbes from the environment outside. Now, scientists in the burgeoning field of "microbial biogeography" say this could help us understand why people in cities tend to develop diseases that are very different from people in the country.

Your body is full of microbes—indeed, a recent estimate suggests there are more single-celled aliens in your body than there are human cells. The average human male has about 30 trillion cells, and 40 trillion microbes living inside him. But these little invaders don't stop at the envelope of your flesh. They're constantly being sloughed off with your skin, dribbling out of your mouth, and getting pooped out of your colon. Which is where microbial biogeography comes in. It's the study of all the microbes that live in our environments, whether they come from us, other animals, or elsewhere in the natural world. Taken together, the microbes in an environment—whether it's your gut or the forest floor—are called a microbiome.

There have already been efforts to sequence microbiomes in people's homes, in the soils and waters of many different environments, and (memorably) on the New York City subway. From these experiments, we've learned that our environments are crawling with different kinds of microbes, many of which co-evolved with us and contribute to our good health. Now a new study conducted in and around Brazil reveals that the microbiomes in our homes change dramatically from country to city, and even from room to room in urban homes.

Enlarge (credit: Backblaze)

Adobe Systems has stopped distributing a recently issued update to its Creative Cloud graphics service amid reports a Mac version can delete important user data without warning or permission.

The deletions happen whenever Mac users log in to the Adobe service after the update has been installed, according to officials from Backblaze, a data backup service whose users are being disproportionately inconvenienced by the bug. Upon sign in, a script activated by Creative Cloud deletes the contents in the alphabetically first folder in a Mac's root directory. Backblaze users are being especially hit by the bug because the backup service relies on data stored in a hidden root folder called .bzvol. Because the folder is the alphabetically top-most hidden folder at the root of so many users' drives, they are affected more than users of many other software packages.

"This caused a lot of our customers to freak out," Backblaze Marketing Manager Yev Pusin wrote in an e-mail. "The reason we saw a huge uptick from our customers is because Backblaze's .bzvol is higher up the alphabet. We tested it again by creating a hidden file with an '.a' name, and the files inside were removed as well."

(credit: Spencer E Holtaway)

Facebook will have to face a censorship lawsuit over a 19^th century oil painting of a woman's genitalia, a Paris appeals court ruled on Friday.

The ruling favored a French teacher whose Facebook account was suspended when he posted an image (NSFW) of a famous Gustave Courbet painting called L’Origine du monde. The portrait depicts a woman naked from the waist down at a graphic angle, and it hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The teacher claimed that Facebook censored him, and he is asking for €20,000 (or about $22,500) in damages. Facebook countered that the man’s lawsuit was invalid because Facebook's Terms of Service stipulate (section 15) that all users must resolve disputes with the social network, "in the US District Court for the Northern District of California or a state court located in San Mateo County.”