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Burial options: This mushroom suit digests your body after you die

Fiona MacDonald
Science Alert
Tue, 16 Feb 2016 00:00 UTC
Mushroom suit
With all the focus on how we can reduce our carbon footprint in our lifetime, most of us forget that we continue to have a significant impact on the environment long after we die, thanks to our toxin-riddled funeral industry. But a team of designers has come up with a more eco-friendly option - a jumpsuit woven from mushroom-spore-infused thread called the Infinity Burial Suit.

Also known as the 'mushroom death suit', the idea is that the mushrooms will begin to grow from your body once you've been buried, slowly digesting you, while neutralising any environmental contaminants you harbour - such as pesticides, heavy metals, or preservatives - in the process. First announced to a whole lot of controversy five years ago, the suit will now officially go on sale as early as April this year, with the first test subject already locked in.

The suit relies on the power of mycoremediation, which is the ability for mushrooms to clean up toxic contaminants in the environment. "I was inspired by the idea that mushrooms are the master decomposers of Earth and thereby the interface organisms between life and death," artist and co-creator of the suit, Jae Rhim Lee, told Co.Exist.

Lee and her company, Coeio, have now confirmed their first test subject - 63-year-old Dennis White, who's suffering from a terminal neurodegenerative disease called Primary Progressive Aphasia. And they already have a waiting list of customers "in the hundreds" lining up to try the suit, which is estimated to retail at around US$999.

Comment: See also: No more coffins - These organic burial pods will turn you into a tree when you die

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HAL9000

New surveillance tech means you'll never be anonymous again

Elise Thomas
Wired
Mon, 16 Sep 2019 07:37 UTC
wired surveillance
© Wired
The fight over the future of facial recognition is heating up. But it is just the beginning, as even more intrusive methods of surveillance are being developed in research labs around the world.

In the US, San Francisco, Somerville and Oakland recently banned the use of facial recognition by law enforcement and government agencies, while Portland is talking about forbidding the use of facial recognition entirely, including by private businesses. A coalition of 30 civil society organisations, representing over 15 million members combined, is calling for a federal ban on the use of facial recognition by US law enforcement.

Meanwhile in the UK, revelations that London's Metropolitan Police secretly provided facial recognition data to the developers of the Kings Cross Estate for a covert facial recognition system have sparked outrage and calls for an inquiry. The Information Commissioner's Office has launched an investigation into the legality of the program. But the scandal comes at the same time as a landmark ruling by the High Court in Cardiff that said the use of facial recognition by South Wales police is legal. (The decision is likely to be appealed).

Facial recognition is only the tip of the creepy surveillance iceberg, however. If strict regulation is brought in to govern the use of facial recognition, it is possible we may simply see a switch to one, or several, of the other forms of surveillance technologies currently being developed. Many are equally if not more invasive than facial recognition - and potentially even harder to regulate. Here's a look at some of what might be coming down the pipeline.

Comment: See also:

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Attention

Unfixable vulnerability in Intel chipsets threatens users and content rightsholders


Positive Technologies
Thu, 05 Mar 2020 20:08 UTC
microprocessor
© chiradech, Adobe Stock
An uncorrectable flaw that could not be fixed affect most Intel processors released in the last five years.
An error in chipset read-only memory (ROM) could allow attackers to compromise platform encryption keys and steal sensitive information.

Intel has thanked Positive Technologies experts for their discovery of a vulnerability in Intel CSME. Most Intel chipsets released in the last five years contain the vulnerability in question.

By exploiting vulnerability CVE-2019-0090, a local attacker could extract the chipset key stored on the PCH microchip and obtain access to data encrypted with the key. Worse still, it is impossible to detect such a key breach. With the chipset key, attackers can decrypt data stored on a target computer and even forge its Enhanced Privacy ID (EPID) attestation, or in other words, pass off an attacker computer as the victim's computer. EPID is used in DRM, financial transactions, and attestation of IoT devices.
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Network

The 5G Trojan Horse and what you're not being told!

Derrick Broze
Waking Times
Sat, 22 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
cyber horse
© BUZZBLOG/No, No, No, No, No, Yes/KJN
My name is Derrick Broze. For the past 8 years I have worked as an independent freelance investigative journalist in Houston, Texas. Since 2012 I have covered a wide range of topics, from indigenous resistance at Standing Rock, exposing government and corporate surveillance, and reporting from important trials like Chelsea Manning's sentencing, and the Silk Road trial. Throughout this time, I have noticed that choosing to investigate certain topics, often results in being labeled a conspiracy theorist, or, at the very least, a proponent of less-than-credible journalism. One of these "forbidden" topics relates to potential harms caused by the use of cell phones and related digital technology.

Over the years I have seen articles discussing research on the dangers of radio frequency radiation and electromagnetic fields. Again, I noticed these studies never made mainstream newspapers, or headlines on the 24 hour cable news cycle. Even if the news had reported on this information, would it have made a difference?

This 96 minute documentary exposes the truth behind the global "Race to 5G."
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Electromagnetic Spectrum and 5g
Chapter 2: The Concerns Around EMF's and 5g
Chapter 3: The Big Wireless-5g Takeover
Chapter 4: Solutions
The Conscious Resistance Network Presents:

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Beaker

Helpful devolutionary mutations are rapid and unavoidable: Paper reinforces 'Darwin Devolves'

Michael Behe
Evolution News & Science Today
Thu, 05 Mar 2020 17:17 UTC
Saccharomyces cerevisiae, laboratory yeast
© Bob Blaylock / CC BY-SA
Saccharomyces cerevisiae, laboratory yeast
An interesting paper that strongly reinforces the lessons of Darwin Devolves was recently published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.1 University of Michigan biologists Piaopiao Chen and Jianzhi Zhang looked at the effect of changing environments on the evolution of laboratory yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

They grew 12 replicate cultures of a pure yeast strain separately for 1,120 generations in each of five disparate, challenging environments: 1) in the presence of the carcinogenic dye Congo Red; 2) in the presence of copper ion; 3) at pH 8; 4) in the presence of hydrogen peroxide; and 5) in the presence of the antibiotic neomycin. They also grew replicate cultures successively for 224 generations apiece in the five conditions — that is, the first 224 generations in condition 1, the next 224 in condition 2, and so on, for a total of 1,120 generations.

Chen and Zhang were interested in determining whether adaptive mutations might be lost when conditions were changed, because lab evolution experiments seem to show a lot more adaptive mutations than are seen in the wild. Sure enough, the authors saw that some helpful mutations that arose and were being selected in condition 1 were lost when the yeast was switched to condition 2, and different helpful mutations were gained. Then some of those were lost in condition 3 while others were gained, and so on. At the end of 1,120 generations, the yeast culture that had been rotated through the five environments had significantly fewer net mutations than the sum of all those that had come and gone during the course of the experiment. Chen and Zhang concluded that beneficial mutations can be undercounted in changing environments, both in the lab and in nature.
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Wine n Glass

New repair mechanism for alcohol-induced DNA damage discovered


Hubrecht Institute
Wed, 04 Mar 2020 17:21 UTC
Alcohol-induced interstrand crosslink (ICL)
© MRC-Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Artist impression of an alcohol-induced interstrand crosslink (ICL). The ICL is the yellow connection between both DNA strands, making them stick together.
Researchers of the Hubrecht Institute (KNAW) in Utrecht, The Netherlands, and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, United Kingdom, have discovered a new way in which the human body repairs DNA damage caused by a degradation product of alcohol. That knowledge underlines the link between alcohol consumption and cancer. The research groups of Puck Knipscheer and Ketan J. Patel worked together on this study and published the results in the scientific journal Nature on the 4th of March.

Our DNA is a daily target for a barrage of damage caused by radiation or toxic substances such as alcohol. When alcohol is metabolized, acetaldehyde is formed. Acetaldehyde causes a dangerous kind of DNA damage - the interstrand crosslink (ICL) - that sticks together the two strands of the DNA. As a result, it obstructs cell division and protein production. Ultimately, an accumulation of ICL damage may lead to cell death and cancer.
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Mars

Curiosity Mars rover snaps its highest-resolution panorama yet

Andrew Good, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Phys.org
Wed, 04 Mar 2020 10:27 UTC
mars panorama
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
NASA's Curiosity rover captured its highest-resolution panorama of the Martian surface between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 2019.
NASA's Curiosity rover has captured its highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface. Composed of more than 1,000 images taken during the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday and carefully assembled over the ensuing months, the composite contains 1.8 billion pixels of Martian landscape. The rover's Mast Camera, or Mastcam, used its telephoto lens to produce the panorama; meanwhile, it relied on its medium-angle lens to produce a lower-resolution, nearly 650-million-pixel panorama that includes the rover's deck and robotic arm.

Both panoramas showcase "Glen Torridon," a region on the side of Mount Sharp that Curiosity is exploring. They were taken between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, when the mission team was out for the Thanksgiving holiday. Sitting still with few tasks to do while awaiting the team to return and provide its next commands, the rover had a rare chance to image its surroundings from the same vantage point several days in a row. (Look closer: A special tool allows viewers to zoom into this panorama.)

Comment: See also:

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Magnify

Hey, Paul Davies — Your ID is Showing!

Robert F. Shedinger
Evolution News & Science Today
Fri, 06 Mar 2020 18:15 UTC
Paul Davies
© Cmichel67 / CC BY-SA.
Paul Davies
No better advertisements for intelligent design exist than works written by establishment scientists that unintentionally make design arguments. I can think of few better examples than well-known cosmologist Paul Davies's recently published book The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life (2019).

With a nod toward James Clerk Maxwell's entropy-defying demon, Davies argues that the gulf between physics and biology is completely unbridgeable without some fundamentally new concept. Since living organisms consistently resist the ravages of entropy that all forms of inanimate matter are subject to, there must be some non-physical principle allowing living matter to consistently defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And for Davies there is; the demon in the machine turns out to be information.

Order from Chaos

Throughout the book, Davies marvels at the stunning complexity of life, especially at the cellular and molecular levels. He wonders at the existence of molecular machines like motors, pumps, tubes, shears, and rotors — paraphernalia familiar to human engineers — and their ability to manipulate information in clear and super-efficient ways, in Davies's words "conjuring order out of chaos." In fact, he calls the cell "a vast web of information management," observing that while molecules are physical structures, information is an abstract concept deriving from the world of human communication.
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Info

Benzene's structure finally solved


Cosmos Magazine
Fri, 06 Mar 2020 17:11 UTC
Benzene Structure
© SIMONEN/GETTY
One of the fundamental mysteries of chemistry has been solved by Australian scientists - and the result may have implications for future designs of solar cells, organic light-emitting diodes and other next gen technologies.

Ever since the 1930s debate has raged inside chemistry circles concerning the structure of benzene. It is a debate that in recent years has taken on added urgency, because benzene - comprising six carbon atoms matched with six hydrogen atoms - is the smallest molecule that can be used in the production of opto-electronic materials, which are revolutionising renewable energy and telecommunications tech.

It is also a component of DNA, proteins, wood and petroleum.

The controversy around the structure of the molecule arises because although it has few atomic components it exists in a state comprising not just four dimensions - like our everyday "big" world - but 126.

Measuring a system that complex - and tiny - has until now proved impossible, meaning that the precise behaviour of benzene electrons could not be discovered. And that represented a problem, because without that information, the stability of the molecule in tech applications could never be wholly understood.

Now, however, scientists led by Timothy Schmidt from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science and UNSW Sydney have succeeded in unravelling the mystery - and the results came as a surprise. They have now been published in the journal Nature Communications.
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Mars

Organic compounds recently discovered by Curiosity Rover consistent with presence of early life on Mars


Phys.org
Thu, 05 Mar 2020 00:00 UTC
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity
© NASA
This self-portrait of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity combines dozens of exposures taken by the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) during the 177th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (Feb. 3, 2013), plus three exposures taken during Sol 270 (May 10, 2013) to update the appearance of part of the ground beside the rover.
Organic compounds called thiophenes are found on Earth in coal, crude oil and oddly enough, in white truffles, the mushroom beloved by epicureans and wild pigs.

Thiophenes were also recently discovered on Mars, and Washington State University astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch thinks their presence would be consistent with the presence of early life on Mars.

Schulze-Makuch and Jacob Heinz with the Technische Universität in Berlin explore some of the possible pathways for thiophenes' origins on the red planet in a new paper published in the journal Astrobiology. Their work suggests that a biological process, most likely involving bacteria rather than a truffle though, may have played a role in the organic compound's existence in the Martian soil.

"We identified several biological pathways for thiophenes that seem more likely than chemical ones, but we still need proof," Dirk Schulze-Makuch said. "If you find thiophenes on Earth, then you would think they are biological, but on Mars, of course, the bar to prove that has to be quite a bit higher."

Comment: See also:

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