Month: October 2022

Enlarge / With physical subscriptions becoming increasingly irrelevant, researchers will have to pay more to get their research published. (credit: Xu Wu / Getty Images)

In August, the US government announced that it was adopting a policy requiring that all the research it funded is open access. A key element of this plan is that, once the policy takes effect, every research paper that results from this research must be open access the day of its publication. That means anyone can view the research—no journal subscription or one-time payment required.

That, obviously, could pose problems for the academic publishing business, which depends heavily on subscriptions as things are currently structured. To adapt to the inevitable future, many publishers have been adopting "article processing charges" (APCs), or fees paid by the people publishing the paper for the privilege of doing so. All of this is raising an awkward question: Who's going to pay the APCs?

On Tuesday, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) released a survey of researchers that suggests some are already struggling to find the cash to cover APCs, and in some cases, are taking it out of budgets that would otherwise pay for scientific work.

Enlarge / A close-up view of a woman sneezing. (credit: Getty | David Jones)

As people build up immunity to SARS-CoV-2 through vaccines, boosters, and infections, the most commonly reported symptoms of COVID-19 have shifted, making the deadly pandemic infection more difficult for many people to distinguish from standard cold-weather viruses.

That's according to recent survey data collected in the ZOE COVID Study, an app-based study with over 4 million users that was created by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard University, King's College London, and the health science company, ZOE.

Since COVID-19 emerged, the common symptoms that have topped standard lists include fever, chills, a persistent cough, and shortness of breath. As the virus spread around the planet, loss of taste and smell were also reported as telltale signs. But these days, those symptoms are almost completely absent from the top five.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Apple on Monday patched a high-severity zero-day vulnerability that gives attackers the ability to remotely execute malicious code that runs with the highest privileges inside the operating system kernel of fully up-to-date iPhones and iPads.

In an advisory, Apple said that CVE-2022-42827, as the vulnerability is tracked, “may have been actively exploited,” using a phrase that’s industry jargon for indicating a previously unknown vulnerability is being exploited. The memory corruption flaw is the result of an “out-of-bounds write,” meaning Apple software was placing code or data outside a protected buffer. Hackers often exploit such vulnerabilities so they can funnel malicious code into sensitive regions of an OS and then cause it to execute.

The vulnerability was reported by an “anonymous researcher,” Apple said, without elaborating.