Tech Xplore reports that activists, journalists, and politicians around the world have been spied on using cellphone malware developed by a private Israeli firm, igniting fears of widespread privacy and rights abuses. The use of the software, called Pegasus and developed by Israel's NSO group, was reported on by the Washington Post, the Guardian, Le Monde, and other news outlets who collaborated on an investigation into a data leak. The leak was of a list of...
Cannabis was first domesticated around 12,000 years ago in China, researchers found, after analyzing the genomes of plants from across the world. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, said the genomic history of cannabis domestication had been under-studied compared to other crop species, largely due to legal restrictions. The researchers compiled 110 whole genomes covering the full spectrum of wild-growing feral plants, landraces, historical cultivars, and modern hybrids of plants used for hemp and drug purposes, reports Phys.org. The study said...
Just 7% of our genome is uniquely shared with other humans, and not shared by other early ancestors, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances. "That's a pretty small percentage," said Nathan Schaefer, a University of California computational biologist and co-author of the new paper. "This kind of finding is why scientists are turning away from thinking that we humans are so vastly different from Neanderthals."
The research draws upon DNA extracted from fossil remains of Neanderthals...
Scientists at Sinai Health have found that all cancers fall into just two categories. Their findings could provide a new strategy for treating the most aggressive and untreatable forms of the disease, reports Medical Xpress. Researchers at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTR) divide all cancers into two groups, based on the presence or absence of a protein called the Yes-associated protein, or YAP. Each classification exhibits different drug sensitivities or resistance. YAP plays an...
The possibility of a lake roughly 20 kilometers across under the Red Planet's southern polar ice cap was raised in 2018, when the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft detected bright spots on radar measurements, hinting at a large body of liquid water beneath 1.5 kilometers of solid ice that could be home to living organisms. Subsequent work found hints of additional pools surrounding the main lake basin. But the planetary science community has always held skepticism over the...
Websites for a Russian-linked ransomware gang blamed for attacks on hundreds of businesses worldwide have gone offline, the BBC reports. Monitors say a payment website and a blog run by the REvil group became suddenly unreachable on Tuesday. The reason behind the disappearance is unknown, but has sparked speculation that the group may have been targeted by authorities. The timing of the outage has sparked speculation that either U.S. or Russian officials may have taken action against...
Scientists at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., have developed a hydrogel integrated with zirconium-based robust metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) that rapidly degrades organophosphate-based nerve agents used in chemical warfare, reports Phys.org. Unlike existing powdered MOF adsorbents, this hydrogel composite does not require added water and may be easily scaled up for use in protective masks or clothing. "Organophosphate-based nerve agents are among the most toxic chemicals known to humanity," says senior author Omar Farha, a professor of chemistry at Northwestern University....
Perhaps being the boss of the world's #1 electric vehicle manufacturer is not all that it's cracked up to be. "I rather hate it, and I would much prefer to spend my time on design and engineering," Musk told a U.S. court. The Tesla founder was speaking at the start of a trial in which he is accused of pressuring the firm's board members into a $2.6-billion deal to buy a solar panel firm. Shareholders claim the...
A new wearable device turns the touch of a finger into a source of power for small electronics and sensors – even when the wearer is sleeping, reports Tech Xplore. Engineers at the University of California San Diego developed a thin, flexible strip that can be worn on a fingertip and generate small amounts of electricity when a person's finger sweats or presses on the strip. It generates power even while asleep or sitting...
To address limitations associated with the astronomical amount of data required to explore and catalogue the universe, a team of researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is investigating self-supervised representation learning, reports Tech Xplore. Like unsupervised learning, self-supervised learning eliminates the need for training labels, instead attempting to learn by comparison. By introducing certain data augmentations, self-supervised algorithms can be used to build "representations" – low-dimensional versions of images that preserve their inherent...
