Month: February 2020

Enlarge / These little round jewels near the Siberian coast are thermokarst lakes, formed when pockets of thawing permafrost deflate as the ice disappears. (credit: NASA EO)

Arctic permafrost has long had a sort of “here there be dragons” status when it comes to climate change. The thawing of permafrost represents a positive feedback that amplifies warming by releasing more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. But characterizing plausible future scenarios in which that release takes place hasn’t been easy.

Making careful measurements of local permafrost thawing has enabled scientists to simulate the general behavior and incorporate that into models. So far, however, those models have been limited to the gradual change that occurs as warming temperatures allow the thawing to reach slightly greater depths each successive summer. But a new study led by Merritt Turetsky at the University of Colorado, Boulder, simulates something different, based on a recent data-gathering effort: abrupt-thaw processes.

Sudden change

Abrupt thaw can occur in a few different ways, but generally relates to pockets of permafrost with a larger percentage of ice inside. If that ice melts, the soil will deflate and collapse. On hillsides, soil may slump downslope or create a new drainage gully. And in low-lying areas, it can create a new wetland or lake as water fills the depression. Both situations can accelerate thaw and carbon-release processes greatly.

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  Step 1: Open Netflix on a desktop Web browser. Netflix hasn't provided steps to change this setting on other interfaces (smartphone apps, smart TV apps, etc.). Notice that the background is a massive autoplaying video. We're going to put a stop to that.

Netflix giveth and Netflix taketh away. It giveth rad '80s hairdos with Stranger Things; it taketh critical thinking skills with Goop. One of its worst "gifts," however, has been the autoplaying previews—with sound!—that burst forth from your TV screen like a Ridley Scott alien if you dare to leave a selection highlighted for more than a moment. Today, that's changing with a new option in your Netflix settings.

This may not sound like a serious problem in the grand scheme of national and universal problems, but it remains deeply annoying. Many have been the times that my family wrapped up a Sunday night episode of The Great British Baking Show only to have some wildly inappropriate-for-families preview clip begin to play. ("Daddy, what does 'Don't F*** With Cats' mean?")

Netflix was so proud of this autoplay-with-sound achievement that, in a 2016 press release, it talked up its "new television user interface that uses video more extensively to bring content alive in real time and helps members decide whether to click play." For Netflix, this was great because it led to more people watching more content. Which it probably did! I certainly tried a few things I would not have tried otherwise. But there was no way to turn it off; I soon felt nearly assaulted by the Netflix app running on my Roku.

Enlarge / Boeing, NASA, and U.S. Army personnel work around the Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft shortly after it landed in December. (credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

On Thursday, during its quarterly meeting, NASA's Aersopace Safety Advisory Panel dropped some significant news about a critical commercial crew test flight. The panel revealed that Boeing's Starliner may have been lost during a December mission had a software error not been found and fixed while the vehicle was in orbit.

The software issue was identified during testing on the ground after Starliner's launch, said panel member Paul Hill, a former flight director and former director of mission operations at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The problem would have interfered with the service module's (SM) separation from the Starliner capsule.

"While this anomaly was corrected in flight, if it had gone uncorrected it would have led to erroneous thruster firing and uncontrolled motion during SM separation for deorbit, with the potential for catastrophic spacecraft failure," Hill said during the meeting.

Enlarge / A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 60 Starlink satellites launching from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on January 29, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images )

SpaceX is likely to spin out its Starlink broadband business, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said today at an investor event.

"Right now, we are a private company, but Starlink is the right kind of business that we can go ahead and take public," Shotwell said at the event, according to a Bloomberg article. "That particular piece is an element of the business that we are likely to spin out and go public."

While CEO Elon Musk has kept SpaceX private, a Starlink public offering would "giv[e] investors a chance to buy into one of the most promising operations within the closely held company," Bloomberg wrote.

Enlarge (credit: portal gda / flickr)

Researchers on Thursday documented two new malware campaigns targeting Android users.

The first involved nine apps that had been downloaded from Google Play more than 470,000 times. With names such as Speed Clean and Super Clean, the apps masqueraded as utilities for optimizing device performance. Behind the scenes, they connected to servers that could download as many as 3,000 different malware variants on compromised devices. Once installed, the apps could log in to users’ Facebook and Google accounts to perform ad fraud. A second, unrelated campaign used cleverly crafted phishing emails to trick users into installing one of the nastiest pieces of malware targeting the Android OS (more about that later).

Not the Play Protect you’re looking for

Once installed, the apps posing as optimizer utilities connected to an attacker-controlled server that’s capable of downloading other malicious apps that perform a variety of fraudulent tasks, including:

Enlarge / The process of repairing the damage cause by CRISPR can cause complicated DNA rearrangements. (credit: Lawrence Berkeley Lab)

The ability to edit genes has raised the prospect of treating genetic conditions and arming the body to better handle infectious diseases and cancers. But for that potential to be realized, we need to deal with a variety of safety issues, as well as work out the ethics of when the technology is appropriate to use.

Today, scientists are releasing the results of a clinical trial designed to test the safety of gene editing as a way of fighting cancer. The results are promising, in that a version of the CRISPR gene-editing system that's already a few years out of date appears to be safe when used to direct immune cells to attack cancer. But the cancers that it was meant to treat simply evolved ways of slipping past immune surveillance.

Editing genes to fight cancer

While there have been a number of gene-editing systems developed, CRISPR/CAS9 is currently the most flexible and efficient. It creates cuts in specific DNA sequences, directed to the sequence by a short piece of RNA. The normal cellular process of repairing these cuts often results in small deletions, which can knock out any genes affected. Alternately, if a replacement sequence is made available, the repair can incorporate the replacement, thus altering the targeted sequence. Either of these, however, can sometimes cause problems by cutting at related sequences or when the repair process accidentally creates large rearrangements.

Purple-clad bowling sensation Jesus Quintana is out of prison and ready for a kinky epic road-trip adventure in the first trailer for The Jesus Rolls, written by, directed by, and starring John Turturro. The film is being touted as a sequel to the Coen brothers' 1998 cult film The Big Lebowski, but in truth the only shared factor is Quintana's character. It's really a remake of the controversial 1974 French film Going Places, which was directed by Bertrand Blier and starred a young Gérard Depardieu.

(Mildest of spoilers for The Big Lebowski below; some spoilers for the 1974 film Going Places.)

When the Coen brothers released their quirky crime comedy in 1998, it received mixed reviews and grossed a modest $46.7 million globally against its $15 million budget. But The Big Lebowski has since achieved cult status, thanks in large part to Jeff Bridges' winsome portrayal of stoner/amateur philosopher Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski and the catchphrase "the Dude abides." There's an annual Lebowski Fest held in various cities, a Church of the Latter-Day Dude, and Bridges even appeared in character last year for a Super Bowl ad for Stella Artois beer.

Enlarge / YOKOHAMA, Feb. 6, 2020: Diamond Princess, a cruise ship which has been kept in quarantine at the port of Yokohama in Japan. (credit: Getty | Xinhua News Agency )

Over 3,700 people on a luxury cruise ship now docked in Yokohama, Japan, are trapped aboard, with guests confined to their cabins for the remainder of 14-day quarantine after the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) joined them at sea.

According to reports from Japan, health officials there conducted the “first phase” of screening this week, testing 273 people aboard the liner—named Diamond Princess—for the viral respiratory infection, which is currently causing an explosive outbreak in China.

On Tuesday, January 4, officials confirmed that 10 people had tested positive, including two Australian guests, three Japanese guests, three guests from Hong Kong, one American guest, and one Filipino crew member. They were escorted off the ship for treatment at local hospitals. None of the cases are serious, Japanese Health Minister Katsunobu Katō said.