Lifeboat Foundation

A flaw in a Bluetooth protocol is leaving millions of devices vulnerable to attacks, according to a study released by a Swiss research institute.

The vulnerability, called Bluetooth Impersonation AttackS (BIAS), allows an intrusion by an attacker posing as a previously trusted Bluetooth device.

“In this paper, we demonstrate that the Bluetooth standard contains vulnerabilities enabling an attacker to impersonate a device and to establish a secure connection with a victim, without possessing the long term key shared by the impersonated device and the victim,” researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne said in their report.

Agency would get a huge technology research arm and a new name.

A tale of GS-441524, the remdesivir sister drug that cures coronavirus (FIP) in cats, but that Gilead refused to develop for fear it would mess up the approval process of remdesivir.

Yes, it a tale of capitalism on steroids, and the FDA on drugs. It’s the kind of thing that may well kill you and your family, but you will never know about it (unless you read about it in The Atlantic, or some obscure journal).

Cat owners are resorting to China’s underground marketplace to buy antivirals for a feline coronavirus.

With more and more people contracting COVID-19, physician-scientists around the world are looking at existing drugs as potential treatments for the novel coronavirus.

Among them are cancer researchers launching new clinical trials or participating in multi-site ones to see whether drugs proven to be effective for another disease, particularly cancer, can help in treating COVID-19 cases.

At Miami Cancer Institute, part of Baptist Health South Florida, researchers are conducting several trials to investigate whether existing cancer drugs might provide some kind of therapy for COVID-19. The rationale: Cancer patients have similar immune system problems as coronavirus patients — namely, dangerous inflammation — and these medications effectively attack that problem.

Oxford University scientists leading the global search for a coronavirus vaccine are to recruit “very healthy” over-55s to help with clinical trials.

The next phase of testing will focus on how older adults’ immune systems respond, the Oxford vaccine group said on Friday.

Continue reading “Oxford University calls for 10,000 volunteers as coronavirus vaccine testing enters next stage” »

To encourage businesses to invest in new technologies, the European Union funds industrial research partnerships worth billions of euros in fields such as clean aviation and hydrogen fuel cells. It also offers direct grants to tech startups, and when Horizon Europe launches next year, it plans to offer them equity investments, too.

Report says scientific output is not translating into innovation.

Summary: Tau spreads through the human brain via neural communication pathways. The spread is accelerated by the presence of amyloid-beta.

Source: Lund University

Toxic versions of the protein tau are believed to cause death of neurons of the brain in Alzheimer’s disease. A new study published in Nature Communications shows that the spread of toxic tau in the human brain in elderly individuals may occur via connected neurons. The researchers could see that beta-amyloid facilitates the spread of toxic tau.

New machine learning methods bring insights into how lithium ion batteries degrade, and show it’s more complicated than many thought.

Lithium-ion batteries lose their juice over time, causing scientists and engineers to work hard to understand that process in detail. Now, scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have combined sophisticated machine learning algorithms with X-ray tomography data to produce a detailed picture of how one battery component, the cathode, degrades with use.

The new study, published this month in Nature Communications, focused on how to better visualize what’s going on in cathodes made of nickel-manganese-cobalt, or NMC. In these cathodes, NMC particles are held together by a conductive carbon matrix, and researchers have speculated that one cause of performance decline could be particles breaking away from that matrix. The team’s goal was to combine cutting-edge capabilities at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) to develop a comprehensive picture of how NMC particles break apart and break away from the matrix and how that might contribute to performance losses.

“Once a chip is designed, adding security after the fact or making changes to address newly discovered threats is nearly impossible,” explains a DARPA spokesperson.