The Coronavirus is Most Deadly if You Are Older and Male — New Data Reveal the Risks

An anonymous reader shares a report: For every 1,000 people infected with the coronavirus who are under the age of 50, almost none will die. For people in their fifties and early sixties, about five will die — more men than women. The risk then climbs steeply as the years accrue. For every 1,000 people in their mid-seventies or older who…

A Quarter of the Alexa Top 10K Websites Are Using Browser Fingerprinting Scripts

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A browser fingerprinting script is a piece of JavaScript code that runs inside a web page and works by testing for the presence of certain browser features. In an academic paper published earlier this month, a team of academics from the University of Iowa, Mozilla, and the University of California, Davis, has analyzed…

Study rules out dark matter destruction as origin of extra radiation in galaxy center

The detection more than a decade ago by the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope of an excess of high-energy radiation in the center of the Milky Way convinced some physicists that they were seeing evidence of the annihilation of dark matter particles, but a team led by researchers at the University of California, Irvine has ruled out that interpretation. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-08-dark-destruction-extra-galaxy-center.html…

‘DiceKeys’ Creates a Master Password For Life With One Roll

Stuart Schechter, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, is launching DiceKeys, a simple kit for physically generating a single super-secure key that can serve as the basis for creating all the most important passwords in your life for years or even decades to come. Wired reports: With little more than a plastic contraption that looks a bit like…

As Colleges Move Classes Online, Families Rebel Against the Cost

“A rebellion against the high cost of a bachelor’s degree, already brewing around the nation before the coronavirus, has gathered fresh momentum as campuses have strained to operate in the pandemic,” reports the New York Times. “Who wants to pay $25,000 a year for glorified Skype?” one incoming freshman tells them: Incensed at paying face-to-face prices for education that is increasingly…

Individualized Circadian Clocks: New Research Suggests Not Everyone Needs 8 Hours of Sleep

Time magazine reports on is a big scientific advance: “the understanding that our bodies often operate according to different clocks.” Although the federal government recommends that Americans sleep seven or more hours per night for optimal health and functioning, new research is challenging the assumption that sleep is a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. Scientists have found that our internal body clocks vary so…

Previous Vaccines and Masks Could Reduce Covid-19 Severity, Some Researchers Say

Applehu Akbar shared CNN’s article about why some people experience Covid-19 differently: “When we looked in the setting of Covid disease, we found that people who had prior vaccinations with a variety of vaccines — for pneumococcus, influenza, hepatitis and others — appeared to have a lower risk of getting Covid disease,” Dr. Andrew Badley, an infectious disease specialist at Mayo…

Inside the ice giants of space

A new theoretical method paves the way to modeling the interior of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune, thanks to computer simulations on the water contained within them. The tool, developed by scientists from SISSA in Trieste and the University of California at Los Angeles and recently published in Nature Communications, allows one to analyze thermal and electric processes occurring at…

Decades-Old Email Flaws Could Let Attackers Mask Their Identities

At the Black Hat security conference on Thursday, researchers will present “darn subtle” flaws in industry-wide protections used to ensure that emails come from the address they claim to. From a report: The study looked at the big three protocols used in email sender authentication — Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and…