Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an announcement from London's Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine: A single MRI scan of the brain could be enough to diagnose Alzheimer's disease, according to new research by Imperial College London.

The research uses machine learning technology to look at structural features within the brain, including in regions not previously associated with Alzheimer's. The advantage of the technique is its simplicity and the fact that it can identify the disease at an early stage when it can be very difficult to diagnose. Although there is no cure for Alzheimer's disease, getting a diagnosis quickly at an early stage helps patients. It allows them to access help and support, get treatment to manage their symptoms and plan for the future. Being able to accurately identify patients at an early stage of the disease will also help researchers to understand the brain changes that trigger the disease, and support development and trials of new treatments....

The researchers adapted an algorithm developed for use in classifying cancer tumours, and applied it to the brain. They divided the brain into 115 regions and allocated 660 different features, such as size, shape and texture, to assess each region. They then trained the algorithm to identify where changes to these features could accurately predict the existence of Alzheimer's disease... They found that in 98 per cent of cases, the MRI-based machine learning system alone could accurately predict whether the patient had Alzheimer's disease or not. It was also able to distinguish between early and late-stage Alzheimer's with fairly high accuracy, in 79 per cent of patients.

Professor Eric Aboagye, from Imperial's Department of Surgery and Cancer, who led the research, said: "Currently no other simple and widely available methods can predict Alzheimer's disease with this level of accuracy, so our research is an important step forward...." The new system spotted changes in areas of the brain not previously associated with Alzheimer's disease, [which] opens up potential new avenues for research into these areas and their links to Alzheimer's disease.
Professor Aboagye adds that this new approach "could also identify early-stage patients for clinical trials of new drug treatments or lifestyle changes, which is currently very hard to do."

Female scientists are less likely to receive authorship credit or to be named on patents related to the work they do compared with their male counterparts -- including in fields such as healthcare, where women dominate -- data suggests. From a report: This gender gap may help to explain well-documented disparities in the apparent contributions of male and female scientists -- such as that of Rosalind Franklin, whose pivotal contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA initially went unrecognised because she was not cited on the core Nature article by James Watson and Francis Crick.

"We have known for a long time that women publish and patent at a lower rate than men. But, because previous data never showed who participated in research, no one knew why," said Prof Julia Lane at New York University in the US, who led the new research. Lane and her colleagues analysed administrative data on research projects conducted at 52 US colleges and universities between 2013 and 2016. They matched information about 128,859 scientists to 39,426 journal articles and 7,675 patents, looking at which people who worked on individual projects received credit and which did not.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The National Security Agency (NSA) and cybersecurity partner agencies issued an advisory today recommending system administrators to use PowerShell to prevent and detect malicious activity on Windows machines. PowerShell is frequently used in cyberattacks, leveraged mostly in the post-exploitation stage, but the security capabilities embedded in Microsoft's automation and configuration tool can also benefit defenders in their forensics efforts, improve incident response, and to automate repetitive tasks. The NSA and cyber security centers in the U.S. (CISA), New Zealand (NZ NCSC), and the U.K. (NCSC-UK) have created a set of recommendations for using PowerShell to mitigate cyber threats instead of removing or disabling it, which would lower defensive capabilities.

Reducing the risk of threat actors abusing PowerShell requires leveraging capabilities in the framework such as PowerShell remoting, which does not expose plain-text credentials when executing commands remotely on Windows hosts. Administrators should be aware that enabling this feature on private networks automatically adds a new rule in Windows Firewall that permits all connections. Customizing Windows Firewall to allow connections only from trusted endpoints and networks helps reduce an attacker's chance for successful lateral movement. For remote connections, the agencies advise using the Secure Shell protocol (SSH), supported in PowerShell 7, to add the convenience and security of public-key authentication:

- remote connections don't need HTTPS with SSL certificates
- no need for Trusted Hosts, as required when remoting over WinRM outside a domain
- secure remote management over SSH without a password for all commands and connections
- PowerShell remoting between Windows and Linux hosts

Another recommendation is to reduce PowerShell operations with the help of AppLocker or Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC) to set the tool to function in Constrained Language Mode (CLM), thus denying operations outside the policies defined by the administrator. Recording PowerShell activity and monitoring the logs are two recommendations that could help administrators find signs of potential abuse. The NSA and its partners propose turning on features like Deep Script Block Logging (DSBL), Module Logging, and Over-the-Shoulder transcription (OTS). The first two enable building a comprehensive database of logs that can be used to look for suspicious or malicious PowerShell activity, including hidden action and the commands and scripts used in the process. With OTS, administrators get records of every PowerShell input or output, which could help determine an attacker's intentions in the environment. The full document, titled "Keeping PowerShell: Security Measures to Use and Embrace" is available here (PDF).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Search Engine Land: Twitter is testing a new feature that would eliminate the constraints of its 280-character tweet limit and allow users to publish long-form tweets. Twitter confirmed the test via a tweet.

When this will become available to all Twitter users? It's unclear. Twitter noted: "We're excited for the moment when everyone can use Notes, but for now, our focus is on building it right. A large part of that is engaging with writers and building community." For now, Twitter plans to test it over the next two months with a small group of writers from Canada, Ghana, the UK and the U.S.

In Twitter Notes, it looks like you will be able to add:
- Formatting: Bold, italic and strikethrough text; insert ordered/unordered lists; add links.
- Media: You can add one GIF, one video, or up to four images.
- Tweets: You can either embed tweets by pasting URLs or from bookmarked tweets.

Notes also has a "Focus mode," that makes the article composer full-screen.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: More than half the UK backs the idea of rewriting the DNA of human embryos to prevent severe or life-threatening diseases, according to a survey. Commissioned by the Progress Educational Trust (PET), a fertility and genomics charity, the Ipsos poll found that 53% of people support the use of human genome editing to prevent children from developing serious conditions such as cystic fibrosis.

There was less enthusiasm for use of the procedure to prevent milder conditions such as asthma, with only 36% in favor, and to create designer babies, with only a fifth expressing support, but views on the technology differed dramatically with age. Younger generations were far more in favor of designer babies than older people, with 38% of 16- to 24-year-olds and 31% of 25- to 34-year-olds supporting the use of gene editing to allow parents to choose features such as their child's height and eye and hair color. In the UK and many other countries it is illegal to perform genome editing on embryos that are intended for pregnancies, but the restrictions could be lifted if research shows the procedure can safely prevent severe diseases.

More than half the UK backs the idea of rewriting the DNA of human embryos to prevent severe or life-threatening diseases, according to a survey. From a report: Commissioned by the Progress Educational Trust (PET), a fertility and genomics charity, the Ipsos poll found that 53% of people support the use of human genome editing to prevent children from developing serious conditions such as cystic fibrosis. There was less enthusiasm for use of the procedure to prevent milder conditions such as asthma, with only 36% in favour, and to create designer babies, with only a fifth expressing support, but views on the technology differed dramatically with age.

Younger generations were far more in favour of designer babies than older people, with 38% of 16- to 24-year-olds and 31% of 25- to 34-year-olds supporting the use of gene editing to allow parents to choose features such as their child's height and eye and hair colour. In the UK and many other countries it is illegal to perform genome editing on embryos that are intended for pregnancies, but the restrictions could be lifted if research shows the procedure can safely prevent severe diseases. Genome editing has been hailed as a potential gamechanger for dealing with a raft of heritable diseases ranging from cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy to Tay-Sachs, a rare condition that progressively destroys the nervous system. In principle, the faulty genes that cause the diseases can be rewritten in IVF embryos, allowing those embryos to develop into healthy babies.

Nasa has begun turning off the spacecraft Voyager's systems, signaling the beginning of the end of the probe's 50-year career. The Independent reports: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 -- two identical probes -- were launched in 1977 and travelled across interstellar space to the edge of the solar system, giving humanity its closest look at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Now, however, Nasa must start limiting the Voyagers' processes in order to keep them operating until 2030. "We're at 44 and a half years," says Ralph McNutt, a physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told Scientific American. "So we've done 10 times the warranty on the darn things."

The first Voyager craft has four remaining functioning instruments, while Voyager 2 has five, all of which are powered by converting decaying plutonium into electricity. This battery has had its output decreasing by approximately four watts every year, leading to Nasa making some tough choices about what to disable; in 2019, engineers had to turn off the heater for the cosmic-ray detector, a key piece of equipment for detecting when Voyager 2 exited the heliosphere- the magnetosphere, astrosphere and outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun.

The final instruments Nasa will disable are likely to be the magnetometer and the plasma science instrument, which are contained in the body of the spacecraft. These are warmed by the excess heat of the computers, while the others are suspended on a 13 meter fiberglass boom, meaning that they are likely to take the longest to get cold. Both craft remain so far from Earth that it takes a radio signal almost 22 hours to reach Voyager 1 and just over 18 for Voyager 2 -- even when traveling at the speed of light.

RISC OS, the operating system of the original Arm computer, the Acorn Archimedes, is still very much alive -- and doing relatively well for its age. The Register reports: In June 1987, Acorn launched the Archimedes A305 and A310, starting at $982 and running a new operating system called Arthur. At the time, it was a radical and very fast computer. In his review (PDF) for Personal Computer World, Dick Pountain memorably said: "It loads huge programs with a faint burping noise, in the time it takes to blink an eye." Arthur was loosely related to Acorn's earlier MOS, the BBC Micro operating system but looked very different thanks to a prototype graphical desktop, implemented in BBC BASIC, that could charitably be called "technicolor." Renamed RISC OS, version 2 followed in 1989 -- the same year that Sun started selling its new SPARCstation 1 (a snip at $9,200) and DEC launched the MIPS R2000-chipset-based DECstation 3100 (for $10,800).

RISC OS has had a rather convoluted history, partly due to Acorn spinning out Arm, eventually pulling out of the computer market, rebranding as Element 14 and being acquired by Broadcom, where Arm co-designer Sophie Wilson still works today. And partly due to drama over the ownership of the OS post-Acorn at one point. One fork of RISC OS still supports Acorn-era Arm's odd 26-bit mode, meaning that today it mostly runs on the commercial Virtual Acorn emulator. The other branch, designed for the 32-bit mode of more recent Arm chips, is now owned by RISC OS Developments, which made it fully open source back in 2018. Development and maintenance is done by the team at RISC OS Open Ltd -- ROOL for short -- which offers downloads for a variety of current Arm hardware, such as the Titanium desktops. [...]

RISC OS Developments are still working on new functionality for the OS. Notably, it recently released a new TCP/IP stack, derived from OpenBSD. Right now, the main benefit is IPv6 support. A feature more significant to most users is still in development: Wi-Fi support. Also still under development, but available to paid backers, is a new RISC OS web browser, Iris. RISC OS does come with a choice of browsers -- NetSurf and Otter -- but the plan is that the new Iris browser will be a native app, with the RISC OS look and feel, but using the WebKit engine for better compatibility with the modern web. The main remaining limitation is SMP. As an OS from the 1980s, long before the 21st-century technology of mainstream multicore processors, RISC OS practically only supports a single CPU core. Various experimental efforts are under way to address this. One has got NetBSD running on another core, and another has the experimental Genode OS running alongside RISC OS. Another effort is working on adding SMP support into the RISC OS kernel itself.

A $14.95 smart lamp from Ikea apparently has enough computing power to run the classic PC game Doom. From a report: A software engineer named Nicola Wrachien removed the smart lamp's computer chip and used it to build a miniaturized Doom gaming system. Over the weekend, he uploaded a video to YouTube, showing his creation in action. The system runs a downsized version of Doom that requires less RAM. The chip from the Ikea lamp has enough processing power to play the game at 35 frames per second over a cheap 160-by-128-pixel display. Wrachien, who is from Hungary, embarked on the project after reading headlines about Doom purportedly running on a pregnancy test. In reality, the pregnancy test was only able to run the game due to an added OLED display and streaming it from a PC.

The Guardian reports: Scientists have successfully developed a revolutionary cancer treatment that lights up and wipes out microscopic cancer cells, in a breakthrough that could enable surgeons to more effectively target and destroy the disease in patients.

A European team of engineers, physicists, neurosurgeons, biologists and immunologists from the UK, Poland and Sweden joined forces to design the new form of photoimmunotherapy. Experts believe it is destined to become the world's fifth major cancer treatment after surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy. The light-activated therapy forces cancer cells to glow in the dark, helping surgeons remove more of the tumours compared with existing techniques — and then kills off remaining cells within minutes once the surgery is complete. In a world-first trial in mice with glioblastoma, one of the most common and aggressive types of brain cancer, scans revealed the novel treatment lit up even the tiniest cancer cells to help surgeons remove them — and then wiped out those left over. Trials of the new form of photoimmunotherapy, led by the Institute of Cancer Research, London, also showed the treatment triggered an immune response that could prime the immune system to target cancer cells in future, suggesting it could prevent glioblastoma coming back after surgery....

The therapy combines a special fluorescent dye with a cancer-targeting compound. In the trial in mice, the combination was shown to dramatically improve the visibility of cancer cells during surgery and, when later activated by near-infrared light, to trigger an anti-tumour effect.

schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: Europe's much-anticipated next-generation rocket, which has a roughly comparable lift capacity to SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster, was originally due to launch before the end of 2020. The Ariane 6 rocket has subsequently been delayed a few times, but before this week the European Space Agency had been holding to a debut launch date before the end of this year. However, during a BBC interview on Monday, European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher said the rocket would not fly until sometime in 2023.

The source said an issue with the "cryogenic connection system" had been a critical item requiring a lot of focus for development efforts and a driver of delays. However, that test was recently completed, with the cryogenic lines carrying liquefied hydrogen and oxygen to the Ariane 6 rocket right up until liftoff, demonstrating a successful release at the correct moment. Due to development issues, other critical tests have been long-delayed as well, such as a hot-fire test of the rocket's second stage, which features a single Vinci engine. The official said he expected the second stage test to occur soon at Lampoldshausen, Germany.

As is often the case, European Space Agency officials and the rocket's developer, Ariane Group, are also struggling to complete ground systems and flight software. "It's the ground systems coming together with the launcher, and they need to talk to each other in a very accurate way," the official said. "This is a source of challenge in every launcher development." The official declined to provide a new, specific launch target for Ariane 6's debut flight. (A separate source has told Ars the working date is no earlier than April 2023). The new launch target is expected to be revealed on July 13 during a joint news conference with European space officials. Meanwhile, SpaceX set a new reuse record after one of its Falcon 9 rockets launched for the 13th time today.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The memory of "Batterygate" continues to be a thorn in Apple's side. In case you need a reminder, "Batterygate" refers to a 2016/17 scandal where Apple added an undocumented battery throttling capabilities to iOS 10.2.1 designed to slow the performance of the iPhone if the battery was deemed to be worn. It also came with unexpected side effects, causing handsets to reboot in cold weather or when the battery's charge level was low. The feature was initially rolled out to iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, and iPhone SE and later expanded to include the iPhone 7, 7 Plus, 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X models.

This latest UK-based multimillion-pound legal claim has been launched by Justin Gutmann, a consumer rights campaigner, and alleges that Apple deliberately misled users, and rather than roll out a battery recall or replacement program; the company instead pushed out this feature to cover up the fact that older iPhone batteries were not able to cope with the new power demands put on them.

Apple did eventually roll out a $29 battery replacement program, a program that saw the company carry out 11 million battery replacements in 2018, compared to the 1 to 2 million that would normally be carried out in a year. This resulted in Apple issuing a profit warning in January 2019, the company's first since 2002. If Apple loses, the company could be forced to pay damages of more than $950m to the 25 million people who purchased affected iPhones. Following the US settlement in March 2020, Apple agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over the same issue, paying out $25 per iPhone, with the total capped at $310m. "We have never -- and would never -- do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades," Apple said in a statement on Thursday. "Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that."

The U.K. government has published its final response to a data 'reform' consultation it kicked off last year, laying out how it intends to diverge from EU-based data protection rules. From a report: At first pass, it looks like it has stepped away from some of the more extreme 'reforms' it had been tossing around -- such as removing the right for human review of automated/AI decisions; which the consultation admits was opposed by the "vast majority" of respondents (ergo, the government writes that it "recognises the importance of appropriate safeguards, and will not pursue this proposal"; although it says it's still considering how to amend Article 22 of the U.K. GDPR -- so watch that space).

That said, there are still a lot of potentially wide-ranging amendments being announced in this package -- such as a switch to an opt-out model for most online tracking; which the government is spinning as an end to cookie consent pop-ups but which raises plenty of wider questions -- and changes to the U.K.'s data protection regulator that could still sum to substantial differences for the rights of citizens, businesses and other types of data processors operating in the country. There's plenty more incoming from the U.K. government on the digital policy front too -- such as the sprawling Online Safety Bill, which is currently making its way through parliament, and is set to dramatically ramp up compliance demands for all sorts of businesses. So it pays to keep the wider picture in mind as the government spins its pitch of post-Brexit, rebooted data laws that will give British business a "boost" by cutting EU 'red tape.'

The UK's digital minister reiterated the government's ambition to make Britain a global crypto hub while sounding a cautious note about the potential criminal uses of digital assets. From a report: "We do intend the United Kingdom and London to be crypto centers," Chris Philp said in an interview with Bloomberg Radio on Wednesday. "But of course we've got to do that in a way that protects the public and in particular pays attention to issues concerning for example money laundering, and making sure that crypto is not used as a way to circumvent things like sanctions." The UK Treasury in April announced plans to make the country a global crypto hub, soothing an industry that had sparred with the financial regulator over what it considered to be overly strict guardrails. Retail investors in the UK are barred from using crypto derivatives, and authorities are imposing tougher rules on marketing. [...] "The Treasury are working closely with the Bank of England, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority to make sure that balance is struck in the right way," said Philp.

"A new supercomputer called Frontier has been widely touted as the world's first exascale machine — but was it really?"

That's the question that long-time Slashdot reader MattSparkes explores in a new article at New Scientist... Although Frontier, which was built by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, topped what is generally seen as the definitive list of supercomputers, others may already have achieved the milestone in secret....

The definitive list of supercomputers is the Top500, which is based on a single measurement: how fast a machine can solve vast numbers of equations by running software called the LINPACK benchmark. This gives a value in float-point operations per second, or FLOPS. But even Jack Dongarra at Top500 admits that not all supercomputers are listed, and will only feature if its owner runs the benchmark and submits a result. "If they don't send it in it doesn't get entered," he says. "I can't force them."

Some owners prefer not to release a benchmark figure, or even publicly reveal a machine's existence. Simon McIntosh-Smith at the University of Bristol, UK points out that not only do intelligence agencies and certain companies have an incentive to keep their machines secret, but some purely academic machines like Blue Waters, operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are also just never entered.... Dongarra says that the consensus among supercomputer experts is that China has had at least two exascale machines running since 2021, known as OceanLight and Tianhe-3, and is working on an even larger third called Sugon. Scientific papers on unconnected research have revealed evidence of these machines when describing calculations carried out on them.

McIntosh-Smith also believes that intelligence agencies would rank well, if allowed. "Certainly in the [US], some of the security forces have things that would put them at the top," he says. "There are definitely groups who obviously wouldn't want this on the list."

"Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin believes that unfriendly artificial intelligence poses the biggest risk to humanity..." reports a recent article from Benzinga: [In a tweet] Buterin shared a paper by AI theorist and writer Eliezer Yudkowsky that made a case for why the current research community isn't doing enough to prevent a potential future catastrophe at the hands of artificially generate intelligence. [The paper's title? "AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities."]

When one of Buterin's Twitter followers suggested that World War 3 is likely a bigger risk at the moment, the Ethereum co-founder disagreed. "Nah, WW3 may kill 1-2b (mostly from food supply chain disruption) if it's really bad, it won't kill off humanity. A bad AI could truly kill off humanity for good."

The UK is facing an exodus of star scientists, with at least 16 recipients of prestigious European grants making plans to move their labs abroad as the UK remains frozen out of the EU's flagship science programme. From a report: Britain's participation in Horizon Europe has been caught in the crosshairs of the dispute over Brexit in Northern Ireland, meaning that 143 UK-based recipients of European Research Council fellowships this week faced a deadline of either relinquishing their grant or transferring it to an institute in an eligible country. The UK government has promised to underwrite the funding, totalling about 250m pound ($307m), but a growing number of scientists appear likely to reject the offer and instead relocate, along with entire teams of researchers.

The ERC said 16 academics had recently informed it that they intend to move their lab abroad or are in negotiations about doing so. These researchers, and some others, have been given an extension before their grants are terminated. Moritz Treeck, a group leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London who is due to receive $2.1m over five years from the ERC to study the malaria pathogen, is among those contemplating a move. He said a major downside of the UK offer was the lack of flexibility about moving the funding internationally.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has concluded that Google and Apple "hold all the cards" when it comes to mobile phones a year after taking a closer look at their "duopoly." It's now consulting on the launch of a market investigation into the tech giants' market power in mobile browsers, as well as into Apple's cloud gaming restrictions. From a report: In addition, the CMA has launched a separate investigation into Google's Play Store rules -- the one that requires certain app developers to use the tech giant's payment system for in-app purchases, in particular. The CMA has concluded after its year-long study that the tech giants do indeed exhibit an "effective duopoly" on mobile ecosystems. A total of 97 percent of all mobile web browsing in the UK is powered by Apple's and Google's browser engines. iPhones and Android devices typically come with Safari and Chrome pre-installed, which means their browsers have the advantage from the start. Further, Apple requires developers to make sure their iOS and iPadOS apps are using its WebKit engine to browse the web. That limits the incentives Apple may have to invest in Safari, the CMA said.

The UK government says it is not "currently considering" copying European Union plans for a common charging cable. From a report: The EU has provisionally agreed all new portable electronic devices must, by autumn 2024, use a USB Type-C charger, a move it says will benefit consumers. Critics say it will stifle innovation. Under the current post-Brexit arrangements, the regulation would apply to Northern Ireland, according to EU and UK officials. According to the a December 2021 parliamentary report, the "new requirements may also apply to devices sold in Northern Ireland under the terms of the Northern Ireland protocol in the Brexit agreement, potentially triggering divergence of product standards with the rest of the UK." The treaty works by keeping Northern Ireland inside the EU's single market for goods, while the rest of the UK is outside it. A row between the UK and EU about how to reform the Northern Ireland protocol remains unresolved. A UK government spokesperson said "we are not currently considering replicating this requirement."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Independent: The biggest ever four-day working week pilot is set to begin in the UK, with over 70 companies and 3,300 workers ready to take part. The trial will result in no loss of pay for employees, based on the principle of the 100:80:100 model. Employees will receive 100 percent of the pay for 80 percent of the time in exchange for a commitment to maintaining 100 percent productivity.

An impressive list of companies are taking part in the trial from a wide range of sectors including banking, care, online retail, IT software training, housing, animation studios, hospitality and many more. The pilot is running for six months and is being organized by 4 Day Week Global in partnership with leading think tank Autonomy, the 4 Day Week UK Campaign and researchers at Cambridge University, Oxford University and Boston College. [...] Researchers will work with each participating organization to measure the impact on productivity in the business and the wellbeing of its workers, as well as the impact on the environment and gender equality. Government-backed four-day week trials are also due to begin later this year in Spain and Scotland.