Category: Uncategorised

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.”

(credit: British Columbia Emergency Photos)

The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington state has sued the Tacoma Police Department (TPD) on behalf of four community leaders, claiming that TPD has not adequately responded to their public records requests concerning the use of cell-site simulators, or stingrays.

The Thursday lawsuit comes nine months after Washington imposed a new warrant requirement for stingray use in the state and about 15 months after local Pierce County judges imposed stricter guidelines for their use.

Stingrays are in use by both local and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide. The devices determine a target phone’s location by spoofing or simulating a cell tower. Mobile phones in range of the stingray then connect to it and exchange data with the device as they would with a real cell tower. Once deployed, stingrays intercept data from the target phone along with information from other phones within the vicinity—up to and including full calls and text messages. At times, police have falsely claimed that information gathered from a stingray has instead come from a confidential informant.

(credit: Kārlis Dambrāns)

In a new letter, Apple has asked a judge to finally rule in a case where the government is trying to force the company to unlock a seized iPhone 5S running iOS 7. Currently, United States Magistrate Judge James Orenstein has been sitting on the case for nearly three months.

In the Friday letter, Apple attorney Marc Zwillinger says that ruling now is important, as the government plans to make similar requests of Apple in the future. Prosecutors have invoked the All Writs Act, an 18th-century federal law that simply allows courts to issue a writ (or order) that compels a person or company to do something. For some time now, prosecutors have turned to courts to try to force companies to help in situations where authorities are otherwise stymied.

As Zwillinger wrote:

Shake 'em up, boss. (credit: Berkeley Seismological Laboratory)

Imagine you’re a seismologist. In addition to studying data from earthquakes after the fact, you’d like to get out warnings to help save lives the moment one hits. To do that, you’re going to need enough seismometers to guarantee that you have one near the epicenter.

Seismometers cost money to install and operate properly—but everyone with a smartphone has a passable one in their pocket. Harness enough of them and you’ve got yourself a crowdsourced earthquake-detection network that could work absolutely anywhere.

Researchers have played with similar ideas in the past but have mainly had to rely on dedicated devices, along with volunteers who were willing to connect them to their computers. But in a paper published today in Science Advances, a group led by University of California-Berkeley’s Qingkai Kong describes an Android app (available now) that’s up to the task.

(credit: Ars Technica/Aurich Lawson)

Ubisoft's latest earnings report shows that the French mega-publisher is making significantly more money from selling PS4 games than Xbox One games. That's not surprising, considering that the PS4 is handily outselling the Xbox One worldwide. What is somewhat surprising is that the Xbox One owners appear to be spending more on Ubisoft games on a per user basis (as VentureBeat noticed).

Ubisoft didn't break out this per-user stat in its most recent earnings report, but it did report that 41 percent of its holiday quarter 2015 revenue came from PS4 game sales versus 27 percent of revenue from Xbox One games. So in their entirety, the PS4 market is currently worth about 52 percent more to Ubisoft than the Xbox One market (all of Ubisoft's recent games have come out for both platforms).

The best available hardware sell-through estimates, though, suggest that there were 35.9 million PS4s in homes worldwide at the end of 2015 compared to 19.1 million Xbox One units. Based on those figures, the size of the PS4 market should be 88 percent bigger than the Xbox One market all things being equal (the ratio changes only slightly if you look at estimates for consoles shipped to stores by the end of the year).