Month: January 2020

Enlarge / Colonies of genetically modified yeast. (credit: Conor Lawless)

A little while ago, we covered the idea of using photovoltaic materials to drive enzymatic reactions in order to produce specific chemicals. The concept is being considered mostly because doing the same reaction in a cell is often horribly inefficient because everything else in the cell is trying to regulate the enzymes, trying to use the products, trying to convert the byproducts into something toxic, or up to something even more annoying. But in many cases, these reactions rely on chemicals that are only made by cells, leaving some researchers to suspect it still might be easier to use living things in the end.

A new paper in Nature Catalysis may support or contradict this argument, depending on your perspective. In the end, the authors of the new paper re-engineer standard brewer's yeast to produce molecules that can be used as fuel for internal combustion engines. The full catalog of changes they have to make is a bit mind-numbing and most achieve a small, incremental increase in production. The end result is a large step forward toward biofuel production, but the effort involved is intimidating.

Making fuel

Brewer's yeast, as the name implies, can already produce a biofuel: alcohol. But ethanol isn't a drop-in replacement for many current uses, which raises questions about its overall utility. If we have to re-engineer both our engines and our infrastructure in order to use it to replace fossil fuels, then there's not much space for a smooth transition away from gasoline and other liquid fuels.

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  Welcome to the new Radiohead Library. This is the band's A Moon Shaped Pool collection, as seen in a desktop browser. [credit: Radiohead ]

On Monday, British rock band Radiohead rolled out arguably the most comprehensive one-stop website for a single band we've ever seen—and for an Internet-savvy band like Radiohead, that's saying something.

The Radiohead Library, which can be found at the sensible URL of radiohead.com/library, includes nearly every official studio release since the band's debut album Pablo Honey launched in 1993, along with much, much more. Full concerts, TV appearances, CD booklet art, long-lost promotional videos: they're all here.

Whether you visit the site on a smartphone or desktop browser, it's formatted to present each Radiohead era as a series of squares and rectangles. The top of the site includes generic, single-colored squares, which each represent a major studio album. Click any of them to reveal the album, its associated EPs and singles, and a scattershot assortment of official music videos, full concert recordings, and other audio and video samples from that album's era. While you're picking through each era, you may notice squares with T-shirt logos. Turns out, these link to reprints of classic tour shirts and merchandise from almost every Radiohead album, back on sale for the first time in years.

Enlarge / Boeing 737 Max planes. (credit: Boeing)

Boeing is aiming to borrow $10 billion or more to help it get through the 737 Max crisis, CNBC reported today, citing people familiar with the matter.

"The company has secured at least $6 billion from banks so far, the people said, and is talking to other lenders for more contributions," CNBC wrote. Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan already agreed to loan Boeing money.

A Boeing 737 Max crash killed 189 people in October 2018 and another crash killed 159 people in March 2019. The US Federal Aviation Administration and governments from around the world ordered the grounding of 737 Max planes after the March crash.

Enlarge / Medical staff transfer patients to Jin Yintan hospital on January 17, 2020 in Wuhan, Hubei, China. (credit: Getty )

An outbreak of a never-before-seen coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan dramatically worsened over the last few days with the case count more than tripling, cases appearing in new cities, and confirmation that the virus is spreading person-to-person.

The World Health Organization announced Monday that it will convene an emergency meeting on Wednesday, January 22, to assess the outbreak and how best to manage it

On Saturday, January 18, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission reported 136 newly identified cases of the viral pneumonia and one additional death. On Tuesday, January 21 (local time 4:18am), the commission reported another death. That brings Wuhan’s totals to 198 cases and four deaths. Just one day earlier, on January 17, the health commission had reported just 62 cases and two deaths.

Enlarge / Ships full of lawyers descend on planet Cloud Imperium to deal with the fallout from this trial. (credit: Star Citizen)

Back in late 2017, we told you about Crytek's lawsuit against Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games, over an "exclusive" license to use CryEngine in its titles. Now, over two years (and one failed settlement attempt) later, the two companies are fighting over how, exactly, that lawsuit should be dismissed.

The actual allegations and counter-allegations between Crytek and Cloud Imperium get pretty labyrinthine pretty quickly. But a core part of Crytek's argument is that its original agreement with Cloud Imperium only covered the use of CryEngine in Star Citizen and not the single-player Squadron 42 spin-off (Cloud Imperium disputes this characterization of the original license).

Technically, though, any supposed breach of Crytek's license won't actually take place until and unless Squadron 42 is actually released. And with that game's "staggered development" beta test recently pushed back to the third quarter of 2020, Crytek this month filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss its own lawsuit "without prejudice to re-filing those claims upon the actual release of Squadron 42." In essence, this "dismissal" would just delay the trial from its currently planned June start date to October 13 (if Squadron 42 has indeed come out by then).

Enlarge (credit: Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

On January 19, Citrix released some permanent fixes to a vulnerability on the company's Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Citrix Gateway virtual private network servers that allowed an attacker to remotely execute code on the gateway without needing a login. The vulnerability affects tens of thousands of known VPN servers, including at least 260 VPN servers associated with US federal, state, and local government agencies—including at least one site operated by the US Army.

The patches are for versions 11.1 and 12.0 of the products, formerly marketed under the NetScaler name. Other patches will be available on January 24. These patches follow instructions for temporary fixes the company provided to deflect the crafted requests associated with the vulnerability, which could be used by an attacker to gain access to the networks protected by the VPNs.

Fermin J. Serna, chief information security officer at Citrix, announced the fixes in a blog post on Sunday. At the same time, Serna revealed that the vulnerability—and the patches being released—also applied to Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway Virtual Appliances hosted on virtual machines on all commercially available virtualization platforms, as well as those hosted in Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Platform, and Citrix Service Delivery Appliances (SDXs).

Enlarge / The Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in California. (credit: Caltech Optical Observatories)

Astronomers have found nearly 1 million asteroids in our Solar System, with the vast majority located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

It is far rarer to find asteroids with orbits closer to the Sun, and especially inside the orbit of Earth, due to Jupiter's gravitational influence. There are only about 20 known asteroids with orbits entirely inside that of Earth's. They are called Atira asteroids.

Many of these Atira asteroids have orbits that are substantially tilted away from the plane of the Solar System, suggesting past encounters with Mercury or Venus.

Enlarge / A Frontier Communications service van. (credit: Mike Mozart)

Frontier Communications is planning to file for bankruptcy within two months, Bloomberg reported last week.

The telco "is asking creditors to help craft a turnaround deal that includes filing for bankruptcy by the middle of March, according to people with knowledge of the matter," Bloomberg wrote.

Frontier CEO Bernie Han and other company executives "met with creditors and advisers Thursday and told them the company wants to negotiate a pre-packaged agreement before $356 million of debt payments come due March 15," the report said. The move would likely involve Chapter 11 bankruptcy to let Frontier "keep operating without interruption of telephone and broadband service to its customers."