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Submission + - Russia arrests former world chess champion Garry Kasparov (mirror.co.uk)

Submitted by ArchieBunker
ArchieBunker writes: Russia has arrested Garry Kasparov and charged him in connection with foreign agent and terrorist charges — much to the former chess champion's amusement.

The city court in Syktyvkar, the largest city in Russia's northwestern Komi region, announced it had arrested the grandmaster in absentia alongside former Russian parliament member Gennady Gudkov, Ivan Tyutrin co-founder of the Free Russia Forum — which has been designated as an 'undesirable organisation in the country — as well as former environmental activist Yevgenia Chirikova.

All were charged with setting up a terrorist society, according to the court's press service. As all were charged in their absence, none were physically held in custody.

"The court has selected a measure of restraint for Garry Kasparov, Gennady Gudkov, Yevgenia Chirikova and Ivan Tyutrin, charged with establishing and heading a terrorist society, funding terrorist activity and justifying it publicly," the court said according to Kremlin-backed outlet TASS. "The court granted the investigative bodies’ motions to remand Kasparov, Gudkov, Chirikova and Tyutrin in custody as a measure of restraint."

Kasparov responded to the court's bizarre arrest statement in an April 24 post shared on X, formerly Twitter. "In absentia is definitely the best way I've ever been arrested," he said. "Good company, as well. I'm sure we're all equally honoured that Putin's terror state is spending time on this that would otherwise go persecuting and murdering."

Submission + - Fake DMCA takedowns blocking journalists' stories (bbc.co.uk) 2

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'Journalists have been forced to temporarily take down articles critical of powerful oil lobbyists due to the exploitation of US copyright law, according to a new report.

'At least five such articles have been subject to fake copyright claims, including one by the respected South African newspaper Mail & Guardian, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

'The claims — which falsely assert ownership of the stories — have been made by mystery individuals under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a law meant to protect copyright holders.'

Time for some intermediary to be required to have skin in the game so that when a takedown is shown to be false, the intermediary gets smacked? Or all DMCA notices to be issued by real people on behalf of organisations whose beneficial ownership is known?

Submission + - SPAM: Webb Telescope captures 5 different, dazzling views of a nearby galaxy

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: It only took 25 years of development, 17 years of construction, eight launch delays, and five months of alignments, but finally, the James Webb Space Telescope is almost ready for prime time. New photos released by the European Space Agency (ESA) — and an accompanying video from NASA — show images of stars taken by a fully aligned space telescope, instruments and all.

The image shows snapshots from each of Webb’s three imaging instruments, plus its spectrograph and guidance sensor. The images show a field of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a galaxy near the Milky Way about 158,000 light-years away. If it orbits our galaxy, it would be, by far, the largest satellite galaxy. But there’s a chance it’s just passing through or slowly merging with our galaxy.
Link to Original Source

Comment Re: Timing (Score 1) 310

by Minion of Eris (#62278445) Attached to: Canada's Major Banks Go Offline in Mysterious Hours-long Outage
THIS IS CANADA you Ass Hat, stop trying to export your history onto us. Didn't work in when you sent up the Fenians or your troops in 1812, won't work now. You realize all of the money you are sending up here is going to be seized and spent on socialized healthcare, don't you? My family left Boston around 1780-82, because we saw your fundamentalist extremism coming. I mean what can one expect from a people who thought Cromwell didn't go far enough?

Submission + - SPAM: Chinese Satellite Grappled Another And Pulled It Out Of Orbit

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: “A Chinese satellite was observed grabbing another satellite and pulling it out of its normal geosynchronous orbit and into a “super-graveyard drift orbit.” The maneuver raises questions about the potential applications of these types of satellites designed to maneuver close to other satellites for inspection or manipulation and adds to growing concerns about China’s space program overall.”
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Race is on to reach sunken US plane... before China (bbc.com)

Submitted by Thelasko
Thelasko writes: The $100m (£74m) F-35C plane came down in the South China Sea after what the Navy describes as a "mishap" during take-off from the USS Carl Vinson.

The jet is the Navy's newest, and crammed with classified equipment. As it is in international waters, it is technically fair game.

Whoever gets there first, wins.

The prize? All the secrets behind this very expensive, leading-edge fighting force.

"The F-35 is basically like a flying computer. It's designed to link up other assets — what the Air Force calls 'linking sensors to shooters'."
China doesn't have that technology so getting their hands on it would give them a huge leap forward.

Submission + - Covid-19 infection can reactivate the latent retroviruses in human DNA (phys.org)

Submitted by He Who Has No Name
He Who Has No Name writes: In a synopsis posted Monday, John Hewitt at Phys.org points out some fairly unsettling implications of an ugly trick by Covid-19 (more formally, SARS-CoV-2) — it wakes up latent viruses that we are born with in our DNA.

A quick version for those not familiar with virology: retroviruses are a subclass of viruses that leave copies of their RNA in the host cell's DNA as part of their replication process, the reverse of the way most viruses replicate (that's where the 'retro' part comes from). Latent, inactive sequences of retroviral DNA make up more than 1% of the human genome. We're literally born with them in our genes.

Now back to Covid's latest trick. From the article:

"Transposable elements, or jumping genes, are now known to be responsible for many human diseases. Keeping them repressed by methylation, RNA binding, or the attentions of the innate immune system is a full-time jump for cells.

Last week, we reviewed the activation of one particular kind of transposable element, the Line-1 retrotransposons, in an ever-expanding host of neurodegenerative conditions. Retrotransposons derive from human endogenous retrovirus (HERVs) but typically have lost their signature long terminal repeat sequences at the beginning and ends of their genes.

On Tuesday, a real zinger was dropped onto the medRxiv preprint server that could potentially explain many of the commonly observed pathogenic features of SARS-CoV-2. The authors provide solid evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein activates the envelope (ENV) protein encoded by HERV-W in blood cells, which is in turn directly responsible for many pathological features of the disease."

While this is all analysis of preprint research, the evidence and implied results are very much in line with other long-term effects from Covid infection, especially neurocognitive symptoms, known to long haul Covid patients as "brain fog". Given that other research is showing long haul Covid cognitive symptoms are more accurately detected by the cognitive function test specifically used for HIV-Associated Neurocognitive Disorder (HAND) compared to standard function tests, the implication of retroviral elements to the puzzle of PACS (Post-Acute Covid Symptoms, the official term now in use for long haul Covid) is disturbing.

The good news: only about 20-30% of people infected with Covid appear to be susceptible. This is, however, conspicuously in line with other data analysis showing that about 1 in 4 Covid victims has PACS / long haul symptoms after the acute infection stage...

Comment NO! (Score 1) 17

by Minion of Eris (#62207053) Attached to: Is Omicron really just a consent-free vaccine?
If you get a vaccine and boosters (and as a result do not contract CoVid), you do not allow the virus an opportunity to use you as a breeding ground for another variant. I know that community sounds an awful lot like commie to some folks, but for F sake there is such a thing as social responsibility.

Submission + - Norton Anti-Virus can now hijack your computer for cryptomining (norton.com)

Submitted by JustAnotherOldGuy
JustAnotherOldGuy writes: The popular anti-virus software company Norton recently "added" a new "feature" which will "allow" the company to use your computer to mine for the Ethereum cryptocurrency whenever you're not using it. Yes, that's right: the anti-virus software wants you to let them remotely control your computer. Norton Crypto is included as part of Norton 360 subscriptions. However, there are coin mining fees as well as transaction costs to transfer Ethereum. The coin mining fee is currently 15% of the crypto allocated to the miner. Transfers of cryptocurrencies may result in transaction fees (also known as "gas" fees) paid to the users of the cryptocurrency blockchain network who process the transaction. In addition, if you choose to exchange crypto for another currency, you may be required to pay fees to an exchange facilitating the transaction. Transaction fees fluctuate due to cryptocurrency market conditions and other factors. These fees are not set by Norton.

Submission + - SPAM: Princeton Team Disables Long-Targeted Gene Behind Spread of Major Cancers

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The mysterious ways cancer spreads through the body, a process known as metastasis, is what can make it such a difficult enemy to keep at bay. Researchers at Princeton University working in this area have been tugging at a particular thread for more than 15 years, focusing on a single gene central to the ability of most major cancers to metastasize. They've now discovered what they describe as a "silver bullet" in the form of a compound that can disable this gene in mice and human tissue, with clinical trials possibly not too far away.

This discovery has its roots in 2004 research in which Princeton scientists identified a gene implicated in metastatic breast cancer, called metadherin, or MTDH. A 2009 paper by cancer biologist Yibin Kang then showed the gene was amplified and produced abnormally high levels of MTDH proteins in around a third of breast cancer tumors, and was central to not just the process of metastasis, but also the resistance of those tumors to chemotherapy. Subsequent research continued to shed light on the importance of the MTDH gene, demonstrating how it is critical for cancer to flourish and metastasize. Mice engineered to lack the gene grew normally, and those that did get breast cancer featured far fewer tumors – and those tumors that did form didn't metastasize. This was then found to be true of prostate cancer, lung cancer, colorectal cancer, liver cancer and many other cancers.

The crystal structure of MTDH shows the protein has a pair of protrusions likened to fingers, which interlock with two holes in the surface of another protein called SND1. This is “like two fingers sticking into the holes of a bowling ball,” according to [cancer biologist Yibin Kang], and the scientists suspected if this intimate connection could be broken, it could go a long way to dampening the harmful effects of MTDH. “We knew from the crystal structure what the shape of the keyhole was, so we kept looking until we found the key,” Kang says. The team spent two years screening for the right molecules to fill these holes without any great success, until they landed on what they say is a "silver bullet." The resulting compound plugs these voids and prevents the proteins from interlocking, with profound anti-cancer effects that resemble those seen in the MTDH-deficient mice from their earlier work.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Breakthrough by McMaster PhD student creates Laser in Silicon (mcmaster.ca)

Submitted by thisisnotreal
thisisnotreal writes: Long sought-after, and previously thought impossible — a McMaster University PhD student in Hamilton Canada demonstrates a cost-effective and simple laser in silicon.
This could have dramatic consequences for the SiP (Silicon Photonics) — a hot topic for those working in the field of integrated optics. Integrated optics is a critical technology involved in advanced telecommunications networks, and showing increasing importance in quantum research and devices, such as QKD (Quantum Key Distribution) and in various entanglement type experiments (involved in Quantum Compute)

Submission + - SPAM: Physicists Detect Strongest Evidence Yet of Matter Generated by Collisions of Li 1

Submitted by omfglearntoplay
omfglearntoplay writes: According to theory, if you smash two photons together hard enough, you can generate matter: an electron-positron pair, the conversion of light to mass as per Einstein's theory of special relativity.

It's called the Breit-Wheeler process, first laid out by Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler in 1934, and we have very good reason to believe it would work.

But direct observation of the pure phenomenon involving just two photons has remained elusive, mainly because the photons need to be extremely energetic (i.e. gamma rays) and we don't have the technology yet to build a gamma-ray laser.

Now, physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory say they've found a way around this stumbling block using the facility's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) — resulting in a direct observation of the Breit-Wheeler process in action.
Link to Original Source

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