As all aspects of transportation deal with the unfolding effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are research needs, gaps, and potential ways to leverage innovation revealing themselves across all modes, systems, and disciplines in transportation. In keeping with the mission of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to provide trusted, timely, impartial, and evidence-based information exchange and research, TRB is issuing an urgent and directed call for Research Needs Statements sp...

Bojíte se, že letos nebudete zatlačovat slzu u zlatavých nekonečných obzorů? Ale budete. A mnozí alergici na řepku slzy zatlačují už teď. Rajčata stojí sice 170kč za kilo, květák je už také kaviárem českých domácností, ale heslo "řídit stát jako zemědělství" nám zajistilo širé moře zlaté barvy. Sice se z řepky nenajíme (teda až na ty, co z pěstování rýžují zlaté dotace), ale že jsou to panorámata, co? 

"America's Funniest Home Videos" will resume the remainder of season 30 the following week at 7:00/6:00c.

In lieu of an attendance fee, ID is encouraging donations to nonprofit organizations that we support at the channel, including: the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, National Network to End Domestic Violence, and One Love.

"Compliments of the day" email scam removal guide

What is "Compliments of the day" email scam?

In most cases scams that are sent via email are used to trick recipients into providing some sensitive information, transferring money or even opening files designed to install some malware. In this case scammer seeks to trick recipients into believing that he can get a huge sum of money out of his country but he cannot do that on his own and requests for assistance, in return for an investment opportunity. Typically, scams of this type are used to extract money from unsuspecting people. This or any other similar scam should be ignored.

A new study released by researchers from the United Kingdom found that for every extra hour a teen spent inactive, there was an eight percent to 11 percent increase in depression later in life. However, there was some good news in the report as well. If a teen increased their physical activity, even just by one hour, it cut their risk of depression by about ten percent. A teen that increased their physical activity by two hours cut the risk by 20 percent.

The researchers also found that just light to moderate physical activity could do the trick. Everyday things like walking at school or home, running errands, and even standing to talk to someone can make a difference. If you feel you should increase your physical activity for your own mental health, try having stretch breaks, always take the stairs, do a few chores, play an instrument, or even just stand at a desk while doing your homework.

There are a few days left to put in a submission on the Electoral (Registration of Sentences Prisoners) Amendment Bill.
The bill would allow prisoners serving sentence of imprisonment under three years to vote, essentially restoring the status quo ante that existed before the members bill advanced by then National MP Paul Quinn was passed by a slim majority
For anyone interested in my views, they're published below. I've been sufficiently organised this time to publish them here a few days before submissions close, so if there are any errors, please let me know. 
The Justice Committee
Electoral (Registration of…

For obvious reasons, there has been a lot of attention paid to work going into developing vaccines that could prevent Covid-19 infection, and drugs that could treat it. In particular, there has been some excitement about new animal trial data for remdesivir, a drug developed by Gilead Sciences. Gilead's share price rose nearly 10% on the day the trial data were announced.
It will be some time yet before the safety and efficacy of remdesvir is established, if ever (it's worth noting that it was tried, unsuccessfully, as a treatment for Ebola). And since I started work on this post…

I started 132 books this year and finished 127. New this year: a twitter thread of everything I read in...

1. Bernie Sanders says (repeatedly) that he wants the United States to be more like Sweden. Bring it on! No estate or inheritance taxes, no minimum wage, a much higher ratio of consumption taxes to income taxes, an income tax system that is by some reasonable standards far less progressive, school choice, high deductibles and […]

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.2.30. This is a security release.All PHP 7.2 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.For source downloads of PHP 7.2.30 please visit our downloads page, Windows source and binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/. The list of changes is recorded in the ChangeLog.

You may have seen the news reports this week that German prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for Dmitry Badin for a massive hack of the German Parliament that made headlines in 2016. The reports about the German arrest warrant all mention that German authorities "believe" that Badin is connected to the Russian GRU and its APT28 hacking group.

The folks over at Bellingcat have done their open source intelligence investigation thing, and provided a ton of evidence to show that Badin almost certainly is part of GRU... including the fact that he registered his 2018 car purchase to the public address of a GRU building. This is not the first time this has happened. A few years back, Bellingcat also connected a bunch of people to the GRU -- including some accused of hacking by the Dutch government -- based on leaked car registration info.

There's much, much more in the Bellingcat report, but the final paragraph really stands out. Bellingcat also found Badin -- again, a hacker who is suspected in multiple massive and consequential hacks, including of email accounts -- didn't seem to be all that careful with his own security:

The most surreal absence of “practice-what-you-breach” among GRU hackers might be visible in their lackadaisical attitude to their own cyber protection. In 2018, a large collection of hacked Russian mail accounts, including user name and passwords, was dumped online. Dmitry Badin’s email — which we figured out from his Skype account, which we in turn obtained from his phone number, which we of course got from his car registration — had been hacked. He had apparently been using the password Badin1990. After this, his email credentials were leaked again as part of a larger hack, where we see that he had changed his password from Badin1990 to the much more secure Badin990.

Yes, the password for at least one of his email accounts... was apparently his own last name and the year he was born. The cobbler's kids go shoeless again.

I should be explaining what's been going on in the British Parliament, with links and explanations. Unfortunately I can't, because...

'B' is for basic controls that up and disappeared

A study of the UK online advertising market, conducted by global accounting firm PwC, has found that publishers get just half of what advertisers spend, with the other half siphoned off by ad-supply chain intermediaries.…

We all need to tighten our belts

For the first time in over three decades, BT has suspended its dividend scheme as the former state-owned teleco grapples with the fallout from the novel coronavirus pandemic, and the financial uncertainty that'll inevitably ensue.…

Компания MediaTek анонсировала свой новый флагманский процессор, который должен составить конкуренцию чипам Qualcomm.

Tattoo pistols are definitely the devices that are used to create and use tattoos. These pistols are also known as tattoo models. They have been utilized for several years to create stylish and delightful bits of system craft. Right now,… Continue Reading →

OK, let’s pick up our discussion where we left off last week, at feasibility.  You did it. You successfully convinced a room full of vice presidents and directors, or maybe even the CEO that they should take your fabulous product idea to the next level.  You’ve got marketing on board, excited to promote it and now it’s time for the work to begin.You are the lead scientist s; (read more)

Source: Suzy - Discipline: BioTech

Spiegel has a piece Inside the Desperate Battle against Sports Doping. Lots of athletes get away with it. Pretty unfair for the ones who do not cheat. I've made this argument many times: anti-doping efforts are a losing cause. Doping techniques will become harder to detect. They will also become more powerful. But there is hope of a sort on the horizon: In 10 years time we have orders of magnitude more understanding of how genetic variants cause differences in human performance. This is inevitable due to the plunging costs of DNA sequencing. As a result it will become possible to measure a person's genetic potential to perform in various sports. Test the genetic potential. Then report for each athlete...

Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University find that robots really do decrease human employment. As robots and other computer-assisted technologies take over tasks previously performed by labor, there is increasing concern about the future of jobs and wages. We analyze the effect of the increase in industrial robot usage between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets. Using a model in which robots compete against human labor in the production of different tasks, we show that robots may reduce employment and wages, and that the local labor market effects of robots can be estimated by regressing the change in employment and wages on the exposure to robots in each local labor market—defined from the national...

Helping you manage those out-of-control feelings!

Nitrozac had to undergo an emergency endodontic procedure, *ouch*, so she is off for a few days to let her recover. We'll be back with a new smile soon, in the meantime, here's one of our fave retros...

---------------------------------------------------[Sat Nov 26 15:25:44 2016]--
From: (S) ease of well-being  (steph)

Subject: Optimism or denial as mental self-defence

A few things recently have given me cause to consider my response to bad things
happening, and my reactions to other people's responses.  First, there's
Trump's election in the US which is undesirable and directly or indirectly
likely to cause some people harm (although I doubt it'll have any effect on me
personally).  I agree that he's not the best or even a good candidate and I
agree that he has incited prejudiced people to show and act on their
prejudices: people are being hurt.  However, I do not like the stream of
articles saying he's a white supremacist or a Nazi or California should secede
or the Electoral College should choose Clinton, or whatever.  Part of this is
doubtless my contrary streak, but part of it is something different.  I observe
that I am semi-consciously adopting a position that `things will turn out all
right' or `it won't be that bad' because countenancing the opposite is not good
for my mental health.

The other thing is some changes in the wider organisation for which I work;
basically there has been a botched reorganisation which has left most people
unhappy and from what I hear from numerous sources with good reason.  This
doesn't currently affect me much and I don't expect it to because of political
realities.  However, even just having the argument with someone closer to the
failing department (and more likely to feel its direct effects) seems to be
followed by my feeling anxious and depressed.  Again, adopting a constructive
positive attitude (which may appear to others pollyannaish, naive, optimistic,
or just in denial) seems to be a defence I've learned here and I suspect it
helps.  But there's more obviously a risk when I'm more involved than I am in
the US case, namely that my optimism will blind me to dangers that will be to
my detriment.

Does my ornery nature come to the rescue, though?  Perhaps because I'm at heart
a bit of a grumpy sod and only respect authorities when I think they deserve it
my tendency to want to probe and prod and query and dig my heels in may
counteract the defensive optimism.  Or alternatively, I'm optimistic in a
different sense: perhaps I just have confidence that I'll win?

LJDW

The renaissance of complement diagnostics and therapeutics has introduced precision medicine into a widened field of complement-mediated diseases. In particular, complement-mediated diseases (or complementopathies) with ongoing or published clinical trials of complement inhibitors include paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, cold agglutinin disease, hemolytic uremic syndrome, nephropathies, HELLP syndrome, transplant-associated thrombotic microangiopathy, antiphospholipid antibody syndrome, myasthenia gravis, and neuromyelitis optica. Recognizing that this field is rapidly expanding, we aim to provide a state-of-the-art review of (a) current understanding of complement biology for the clinician, (b) novel insights into complement with potential applicability to clinical practice, (c) complement in disease across various disciplines (hematology, nephrology, obstetrics, transplantation, rheumatology, and neurology), and (d) the potential future of precision medicine. Better understanding of complement diagnostics and therapeutics will not only facilitate physicians treating patients in clinical practice but also provide the basis for future research toward precision medicine in this field.

IL-17–producing RORγt+ γδ T cells (γδT17 cells) are innate lymphocytes that participate in type 3 immune responses during infection and inflammation. Herein, we show that γδT17 cells rapidly proliferate within neonatal lymph nodes and gut, where, upon entry, they upregulate T-bet and coexpress IL-17, IL-22, and IFN-γ in a STAT3- and retinoic acid–dependent manner. Neonatal expansion was halted in mice conditionally deficient in STAT5, and its loss resulted in γδT17 cell depletion from all adult organs. Hyperactive STAT5 mutant mice showed that the STAT5A homolog had a dominant role over STAT5B in promoting γδT17 cell expansion and downregulating gut-associated T-bet. In contrast, STAT5B preferentially expanded IFN-γ–producing γδ populations, implying a previously unknown differential role of STAT5 gene products in lymphocyte lineage regulation. Importantly, mice lacking γδT17 cells as a result of STAT5 deficiency displayed a profound resistance to experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis. Our data identify that the neonatal microenvironment in combination with STAT5 is critical for post-thymic γδT17 development and tissue-specific imprinting, which is essential for infection and autoimmunity.

Immunosuppression continues to be a necessary component of transplantation, despite its association with a multitude of adverse effects. Numerous efforts have been made to circumvent the need for immunosuppression by using various techniques to achieve donor hyporesponsiveness. In this issue of the JCI, Morath et al. take this endeavor forward. Prior to transplantation, the researchers infused recipients with donor-modified immune cells and achieved immunologic hyporesponsiveness. This successful phase I trial also provides a possible avenue for achieving transplantation without the requisite immunosuppression.

BACKGROUND Mirabegron is a β3-adrenergic receptor (β3-AR) agonist approved only for the treatment of overactive bladder. Encouraging preclinical results suggest that β3-AR agonists could also improve obesity-related metabolic disease by increasing brown adipose tissue (BAT) thermogenesis, white adipose tissue (WAT) lipolysis, and insulin sensitivity.METHODS We treated 14 healthy women of diverse ethnicities (27.5 ± 1.1 years of age, BMI of 25.4 ± 1.2 kg/m2) with 100 mg mirabegron (Myrbetriq extended-release tablet, Astellas Pharma) for 4 weeks in an open-label study. The primary endpoint was the change in BAT metabolic activity as measured by [18F]-2-fluoro-d-2-deoxy-d-glucose (18F-FDG) PET/CT. Secondary endpoints included resting energy expenditure (REE), plasma metabolites, and glucose and insulin metabolism as assessed by a frequently sampled intravenous glucose tolerance test.RESULTS Chronic mirabegron therapy increased BAT metabolic activity. Whole-body REE was higher, without changes in body weight or composition. Additionally, there were elevations in plasma levels of the beneficial lipoprotein biomarkers HDL and ApoA1, as well as total bile acids. Adiponectin, a WAT-derived hormone that has antidiabetic and antiinflammatory capabilities, increased with acute treatment and was 35% higher upon completion of the study. Finally, an intravenous glucose tolerance test revealed higher insulin sensitivity, glucose effectiveness, and insulin secretion.CONCLUSION These findings indicate that human BAT metabolic activity can be increased after chronic pharmacological stimulation with mirabegron and support the investigation of β3-AR agonists as a treatment for metabolic disease.TRIAL REGISTRATION Clinicaltrials.gov NCT03049462.FUNDING This work was supported by grants from the Intramural Research Program of the NIDDK, NIH (DK075112, DK075116, DK071013, and DK071014).

Apple's next-generation Apple Watch and watchOS 7 will focus on new mental health capabilities, according to leaker Jon Prosser who recently spoke on the Geared Up podcast. The mention of new ‌Apple Watch‌ features comes towards the end of the podcast.


The next-generation version of the ‌Apple Watch‌, the ‌Apple Watch‌ Series 6, has been rumored to include a blood oxygen sensor, which Prosser says Apple will take advantage of to implement new mental health-related features, such as detecting panic attacks.

What their biggest focus on is right now and I hope it comes this year, it might come next year, but I hope it's coming to WWDC is mental health capabilities. Where they can take the oxygen levels in your blood with your heart rate and determine if you're hyperventilating.

They can identify a panic attack before it happens and warn you on your watch. Especially if you're driving, they'll ask you to pull over and they'll offer breathing exercises once you get pulled over.

Prosser says that while he hopes the feature is released this year, "it might come next year." He also says he hopes for a WWDC unveiling, but if the new feature relies on a blood oxygen sensor in an unreleased version of the ‌Apple Watch‌, it's not likely Apple will unveil the capability until the fall when new ‌Apple Watch‌ models that support it are released.

There is, however, a possibility that it will be revealed at WWDC if older ‌Apple Watch‌ models have a latent ability to detect blood oxygen level, which is not clear at this time, or if the feature does not involve blood oxygen monitoring.

The panic attack detecting rumor was first shared by EverythingApplePro and leaker Max Weinbach back in April, who said that the ‌Apple Watch‌ will also be able to determine when a user is experiencing high levels of stress. Weinbach and EverythingApplePro did not suggest the feature would rely on blood oxygen monitoring, however, and said that it would be available on the ‌Apple Watch‌ Series 4 or later.

Hints that blood oxygen tracking capabilities are coming to a future version of the ‌Apple Watch‌ were found in a leaked version of iOS 14. Blood oxygen monitoring is an important feature because a drop in blood oxygen levels can suggest a serious respiratory or cardiac problem that requires immediate medical attention.

Multiple prior rumors from Bloomberg and other sources have also indicated that the next-generation ‌Apple Watch‌ and watchOS 7 will include sleep tracking features, allowing the ‌Apple Watch‌ to measure sleep quality, length, and other metrics.
This article, "Rumor Claims watchOS 7 Will Have 'Mental Health Capabilities' to Detect Panic Attacks" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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