Month: June 2024

Enlarge / United Launch Alliance's first Vulcan rocket on the launch pad before liftoff in January. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

The second flight of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket will take off in September with a dummy payload in place of Sierra Space's Dream Chaser spaceplane, preserving a chance for ULA to begin launching US military satellites on the new rocket by the end of the year, officials announced Wednesday.

Tory Bruno, ULA's CEO, announced the change in flight plan for the second Vulcan rocket in a conference call with reporters. There was little hope Sierra Space's Dream Chaser would be ready to make its first resupply run to the International Space Station before the end of the summer.

Dream Chaser had been booked to launch on the second test flight of ULA's Vulcan rocket for the last five years. With the near-flawless inaugural flight of Vulcan in January and a successful second flight later this year, ULA's Vulcan will be certified by the US Space Force to loft the military's most sensitive national security satellites into orbit.

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A critical vulnerability recently discovered in a widely used piece of software is putting huge swaths of the Internet at risk of devastating hacks, and attackers have already begun actively trying to exploit it in real-world attacks, researchers warn.

The software, known as MOVEit and sold by Progress Software, allows enterprises to transfer and manage files using various specifications, including SFTP, SCP, and HTTP protocols and in ways that comply with regulations mandated under PCI and HIPAA. At the time this post went live, Internet scans indicated it was installed inside almost 1,800 networks around the world, with the biggest number in the US. A separate scan performed Tuesday by security firm Censys found 2,700 such instances.

Causing mayhem with a null string

Last year, a critical MOVEit vulnerability led to the compromise of more than 2,300 organizations, including Shell, British Airways, the US Department of Energy, and Ontario’s government birth registry, BORN Ontario, the latter of which led to the compromise of information for 3.4 million people.

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  The streaming-only Xbox would have looked like a smaller, squarer relative of the Series S. [credit: Microsoft ]

Microsoft's mid-generation plans for the Xbox Series S and X consoles looked a whole lot different a couple of years ago than it does now. A leaked slide deck from the FTC v. Microsoft case last year outlined detailed plans for a spruced up Series S, an overhauled Series X, and even a redesigned controller. Another part of that roadmap included a streaming-only version of the Xbox, codenamed Keystone, that was designed to connect to Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming servers rather than rendering games locally.

Microsoft has talked openly about this version of the Xbox before. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer told The Verge that the Keystone console was designed and fully functional, but that it wasn't launched because Microsoft had a hard time getting the price down low enough that it made sense next to the $299 Series S (which already occasionally goes on sale in the $200 to $250 range).

Enlarge / A Diamond Shruumz chocolate bar, which comes in a variety of flavors. (credit: diamondshruumz.com)

The US Food and Drug Administration has identified a synthetic psychedelic compound as well as compounds from a potentially toxic plant in the Diamond Shruumz-brand microdosing candies linked to a growing number of severe illnesses nationwide that have included seizures, intubation, and admissions to intensive care units.

As of June 25, the case total has grown to 39, including 23 hospitalizations, across 20 states, the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

It remains unclear what is in the candies and what may be causing the severe illnesses. Diamond Shruumz does not provide a full list of ingredients. The term "microdosing" and other marketing used by Diamond Shruumz suggests the candies contain a psychedelic compound, but the company does not name any. To figure it out, the FDA has been analyzing multiple samples of Diamond Shruumz-brand candies, including chocolates, gummies, and candy cones. On Tuesday, the FDA reported finding the synthetic psychedelic compound 4-AcO-DMT in the company's Dark Chocolate Bar and its Birthday Cake Chocolate Bar.

Enlarge / Top row: individual steps in the reaction process. Bottom row: cartoon diagram of the top, showing the position of each DNA and RNA strand. (credit: Hiraizumi, et. al.)

While CRISPR is probably the most prominent gene-editing technology, there are others, some developed before and since. And people have been developing CRISPR variants to perform more specialized functions, like altering specific bases. In all of these cases, researchers are trying to balance a number of competing factors: convenience, flexibility, specificity and precision for the editing, low error rates, and so on.

So, having additional options for editing can be a good thing, enabling new ways of balancing those different needs. On Wednesday, a pair of papers in Nature describe a DNA-based parasite that moves itself around bacterial genomes through a mechanism that hasn't been previously described. It's nowhere near ready for use in humans, but it may have some distinctive features that make it worth further development.

Going mobile

Mobile genetic elements, commonly called transposons, are quite common in many species—they make up nearly half the sequences in the human genome, for example. They are indeed mobile, showing up in new locations throughout the genome, sometimes by cutting themselves out and hopping to new locations, other times by sending a copy out to a new place in the genome. For any of this to work, they need to have an enzyme that cuts DNA and specifically recognizes the right transposon sequence to insert into the cut.