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Manipulating RNA can allow plants to yield dramatically more crops, as well as increasing drought tolerance, announced a group of scientists from the University of Chicago, Peking University and Guizhou University.

In initial tests, adding a gene encoding for a protein called FTO to both rice and increased their yield by 50% in . The grew significantly larger, produced longer root systems and were better able to tolerate drought stress. Analysis also showed that the plants had increased their rate of photosynthesis.

“The change really is dramatic,” said University of Chicago Prof. Chuan He, who together with Prof. Guifang Jia at Peking University, led the research. “What’s more, it worked with almost every type of plant we tried it with so far, and it’s a very simple modification to make.”

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“The fact that we recorded it confirmed that the core is liquid.”

What you may not realize, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory geophysicist Mark Panning tells Inverse, is that those diagrams “are cartoons and guesses,” based on gravitational measurements. The only planet whose structure scientists actually understand in detail is Earth.

We know the innards of Earth through seismology measurements — something that hasn’t been available for other planets. This was true until just recently: According to a trio of papers published Thursday in Science, researchers can finally confirm Mars has a large liquid metal core.

Panning is the JPL project scientist for the NASA InSight mission, which landed a seismometer on the Red Planet in 2018 and has been recording Marsquakes ever since. NASA’s InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) lander was designed to reveal the inner structure of Mars through seismological and thermal readings taken from a landing site on Elysium Planitia, a plain along the Martian equator.

Continue reading “NASA finally knows what is beneath the surface of Mars” | >

Stealth recon and intrusion

On Wednesday, France’s National Agency for Information Systems Security—abbreviated as ANSSI—warned national businesses and organizations that the group was behind a massive attack campaign that was using hacked routers prior to carrying out reconnaissance and attacks as a means to cover up the intrusions.

“ANSSI is currently handling a large intrusion campaign impacting numerous French entities,” an ANSSI advisory warned. “Attacks are still ongoing and are led by an intrusion set publicly referred to as APT31. It appears from our investigations that the threat actor uses a network of compromised home routers as operational relay boxes in order to perform stealth reconnaissance as well as attacks.”

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Flexible computer processors have circuits printed onto plastic film.

PragmatIC

Could a flexible processor stuck on your produce track the freshness of your cantaloupe? That’s the idea behind the latest processor from UK computer chip designer Arm, which says such a device could be manufactured for pennies by printing circuits directly onto paper, cardboard or cloth. The technology could give trillions of everyday items such as clothes and food containers the ability to collect, process and transmit data across the internet – something that could be as convenient for retailers as it is concerning for privacy advocates.

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The SENS Research Foundation has apparently already raised four times its annual income thanks to the PulseChain Airdrop.

The PulseChain airdrop supporting aging research

Richard Heart, the founder of HEX, is about to launch a new cryptocurrency called PulseChain. As part of that launch, he has also arranged an airdrop to give away some of the new cryptocurrency in order to support the SENS Research Foundation (SRF).

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A major internet outage has affected the websites of major retail, financial, logistics and travel websites, while 911 service in several Virginia cities appears to be affected by a cut fiber optic cable.

Down Detector, a service that detects whether websites are working properly or not, began reporting a series of at least 50 major website outages shortly before 12pm EST on Thursday.

The websites of UPS, Delta Air Lines, Costco, American Express and Home Depot were down, displaying domain name system (DNS) service errors.

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