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Splunk today announced it plans to acquire security software company TruStar for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will add TruStar’s cloud-native, cyber intelligence-sharing capabilities and automated processes to Splunk’s growing cybersecurity portfolio.

“TruStar will help us get even better at predictive threat assessments by strengthening our threat intelligence framework. This acquisition will allow customers to autonomously and seamlessly enrich their (security operation center) workflows with threat intelligence data feeds from heterogeneous sources,” Splunk president and CEO Doug Merritt told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview.

The pending deal is in line with Splunk’s philosophy that “security is a data problem,” he said. The announcement marks a return to M&A activity for Splunk and the massive $1.05 billion deal for SignalFX in 2019. The company also made four cloud-related acquisitions in 2020.

An international research team analyzed a database of more than 1000 supernova explosions and found that models for the expansion of the Universe best match the data when a new time dependent variation is introduced. If proven correct with future, higher-quality data from the Subaru Telescope and other observatories, these results could indicate still unknown physics working on the cosmic scale.

Edwin Hubble’s observations over 90 years ago showing the expansion of the Universe remain a cornerstone of modern astrophysics. But when you get into the details of calculating how fast the Universe was expanding at different times in its history, scientists have difficulty getting theoretical models to match observations.

To solve this problem, a team led by Maria Dainotti (Assistant Professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI in Japan and an affiliated scientist at the Space Science Institute in the U.S.A.) analyzed a catalog of 1048 supernovae which exploded at different times in the history of the Universe. The team found that the theoretical models can be made to match the observations if one of the constants used in the equations, appropriately called the Hubble constant, is allowed to vary with time.

If ARM doesn’t prove it can be a level playing field in Nvidia’s ownership, customers will defect to alternatives.

Plastic pollution has become one of the most pressing environmental issues now that the rapidly increased production of disposable plastic products is far beyond the world’s capacity for recycling and upcycling waste plastics. Although recent studies have provided a few catalytic strategies for producing value-added fuel and chemical products from polyethylene (PE) waste, the kinetic rates and/or selectivities are unsatisfactory, even with extended processing time (24 h) and high temperatures (280°C). This work reports a liquid-phase catalytic hydrogenolysis process that highly efficiently converts high-density PE to jet-fuel-and lubricant-range hydrocarbons under relatively mild conditions. The application of this efficient liquid-phase catalytic hydrogenolysis process could provide a promising approach for selectively producing high-value products, such as lubricants, from waste PE and other polyolefin polymers.

Bruchsal/Munich, 17 May 2021 – Today, Volocopter, the pioneer of urban air mobility (UAM), unveiled its newest aircraft, VoloConnect, at EBACE Connect. This electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL) is designed to connect suburbs to cities and complements the company’s existing family of aircraft for the intra-city mission. VoloConnect’s distinctive hybrid lift and push design is expected to achieve certification within the next 5 years.

With the capacity to travel longer distances, VoloConnect joins Volocopter’s aircraft family and extends the company’s UAM ecosystem coverage to the suburbs. The new aircraft will be seamlessly integrated into Volocopter’s existing portfolio of UAM ecosystem solutions: VoloDrone, VoloCity, VoloPort, and the digital platform, VoloIQ.

Conditions like recurrent miscarriage, preeclampsia, preterm birth and stillbirth are affected by the female’s immune response in ways that the partner’s sperm contribute to.

Sperm are generally viewed as having just one action in reproduction—to fertilize the female’s egg—but studies at the University of Adelaide are overturning that view.

Published in Nature Research journal Communications Biology, new research shows that sperm also deliver signals directly to the female reproductive tissues to increase the chances of conception.

Continue reading “Sperm help ‘persuade’ the female to accept pregnancy” »

“This was a short-term experiment, just eight weeks,” Liu said. “In people, obesity doesn’t occur overnight or even in eight weeks. People have a suboptimal lifestyle for 20, 30 years before they become obese. It’s possible that if you have Western diet for so long, you cross a point of no return and your Paneth cells don’t recover even if you change your diet. We’d need to do more research before we can say whether this process is reversible in people.”

Eating a Western diet impairs the immune system in the gut in ways that could increase risk of infection and inflammatory bowel disease, according to a study from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Cleveland Clinic.

The study, in mice and people, showed that a diet high in sugar and fat causes damage to Paneth cells, immune cells in the gut that help keep inflammation in check. When Paneth cells aren’t functioning properly, the gut immune system is excessively prone to inflammation, putting people at risk of inflammatory bowel disease and undermining effective control of disease-causing microbes. The findings, published today (May 18, 2021) in Cell Host & Microbe, open up new approaches to regulating gut immunity by restoring normal Paneth cell function.

Continue reading “Eating a Western Diet Impairs the Immune System in the Gut – May Increase Risk of Inflammation, Infection” »

Even as a chip shortage is causing trouble for all sorts of industries, the semiconductor field is entering a surprising new era of creativity, from industry giants to innovative start-ups seeing a spike in funding from venture capitalists that traditionally avoided chip makers.

While a variety of industries struggle with supplies, semiconductor experts say there are plenty of new ideas and, most surprising, start-ups.