Fentanyl Vaccine Developed By Researchers Could Eliminate Drug’s ‘High’

Researchers have developed a fentanyl vaccine that could eliminate the drug’s “high” by blocking its ability to enter the brain — which could be a major step forward in the ongoing opioid crisis. Yahoo News reports: The study, conducted by a research team led by the University of Houston and funded by the Department of Defense through the Alcohol and Substance Abuse Disorder Research Program, was published in the journal Pharmaceutics at the end of October. Colin Haile, a research associate professor of psychology and lead author of the study, said in a news release that the vaccine “is able to generate anti-fentanyl antibodies that bind to the consumed fentanyl and prevent it from entering the brain, allowing it to be eliminated out of the body via the kidneys. “Thus, the individual will not feel the euphoric effects and can “get back on the wagon’ to sobriety.”

Haile added that the anti-fentanyl antibodies didn’t cross-react with other opioids, meaning a vaccinated person could still be treated for pain relief with other opioids. The vaccine did not cause any adverse side effects in rats involved in lab studies, and clinical trials in humans are planned “soon,” with manufacturing of clinical-grade vaccine to begin in the coming months.

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Everyone Is Bullying the UK Government In Its Own Discord Server

The UK Treasury has opened an account on Discord to a torrent of abuse from users of the gamer-focused chat app — abuse they managed to send despite the government blocking all comments on the service. The Guardian reports: With its community-focused approach, where servers encourage tight-knit groups to form and discuss issues related to the overall focus of the topic, Discord may seem an odd fit for the strait-laced world of government communications. But the app has a lot of users interested in finance, thanks to solid take-up among day traders and crypto fans, two groups the Treasury is eager to connect with. The result: a read-only Discord server, where the only user who is allowed to post is the snappily named HMTreasurySocialAdmin1, who shares tweet-length news about the Treasury and chancellor.

But trolls will always find a way. Although posting is banned, emoji reactions are enabled, letting any user respond to a post from the Treasury with a single emoji, and new users are cheerily announced in a “welcome” channel. That means the Treasury’s server has been eagerly posting automated messages such as, “Welcome, LOCK UP PRINCE ANDREW. We hope you brought pizza,” and “Welcome Jeremy Corbyn. Say hi!”. The latter does not appear to be the real account of the former leader of the opposition. […] UPDATE: Emoji reactions and the welcome channel vanished but eventually returned. According to the HM Treasure admin, Discord is the reason to blame for the issues.

“Due to the rapid growth of today’s channel which has seen over 7,000 members join, a technical difficulty has led to reactions being paused,” a post in the news channel read. “We are working with Discord to get reactions turned back on.” The trolling can be continued here.

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California AG Issues Warning-Ladened Guidance For Public Interested In Buying Crypto

With the cryptocurrency market becoming ever more complex and intimidating, California Attorney General Rob Bonta had decided to issue guidance for novice crypto buyers. CoinTelegraph reports: The California Office of the Attorney General’s website now features a page that will help those new to crypto “avoid the hype, [and] get the facts.” “Don’t fall for a fantasy — Cryptocurrency, like all investments, carries significant risks, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll see large — or any — returns,” Bonta said in a statement. “Our new webpage is meant to be a resource for Californians curious about this new and volatile market.”

The new page emphasizes customer safety. It provides a two-sentence explanation of what “crypto assets” are, plus a vocabulary list, and warns that: “Even when there are no scams involved, crypto assets can be risky, especially if you don’t have enough information to make sound judgments about how you’re spending your money.”

Aside from that, the page concentrated on scams, red flags and how to “stay safe.” That information is concise but complete. It reminded the reader of the limit legal recourse available if problems arise with a cryptocurrency purchase, but gave detailed instructions on how and where to file a complaint. Besides explaining what a rug pull and pig butchering are, the guide reminded readers that celebrities are paid for what they say about crypto and that the wise buyer does not fall for Fear of Missing Out.

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FTX Owes Money To More Than a Million People, Court Filing Suggests

The embattled and now bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX may owe more than a million people money, according to a Tuesday court filing (PDF). Motherboard reports: “The events that have befallen FTX over the past week are unprecedented. Barely more than a week ago, FTX, led by its co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, was regarded as one of the most respected and innovative companies in the crypto industry,” the filing notes. “FTX faced a severe liquidity crisis that necessitated the filing of these [bankruptcy] cases on an emergency basis last Friday. Questions arose about Mr. Bankman-Fried’s leadership and the handling of FTX’s complex array of assets and businesses under his direction.”

The filing goes on to state that, originally, it was thought that there were “over one hundred thousand creditors in these Chapter 11 Cases.” It then states that, “in fact, there could be more than one million creditors,” meaning that FTX could owe money to more than a million people, the vast majority of whom are customers and former customers. The filing is an attempt to consolidate and simplify the bankruptcy process; as noted in an earlier filing, FTX operated a highly complex corporate structure with dozens of companies, each of which filed for bankruptcy separately last week. The fate of customers’ money is still up-in-the-air as FTX halted withdrawals last week. According to the Wall Street Journal, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried thinks he can raise enough money to make users whole. “Mr. Bankman-Fried, alongside a few remaining employees, spent the past weekend calling around in search of commitments from investors to plug a shortfall of up to $8 billion in the hopes of repaying FTX’s customers,” WSJ reports. “The efforts to cover that shortfall have so far been unsuccessful.”

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Xbox Transparency Report Reveals Up To 4.78 Million Accounts Were Proactively Suspended In Just Six Months

Microsoft has released its first Digital Transparency Report for the Xbox gaming platform, revealing that the company took proactive action against throwaway accounts that violated its community guidelines 4.78 million times within a six-month period, usually in the form of temporary suspension. The Verge reports: The report, which provides information regarding content moderation and player safety, covers the period between January 1st and June 30th this year. It includes a range of information, including the number of reports submitted by players and breakdowns of various “proactive enforcements” (i.e., temporary account suspensions) taken by the Xbox team. Microsoft says the report forms part of its commitment to online safety. The data reveals that “proactive enforcements” by Microsoft increased almost tenfold since the last reporting period and that 4.33 million of the 4.78 million total enforcements concerned accounts that had been tampered with or used suspiciously outside of the Xbox platform guidelines. These unauthorized accounts can impact players in a variety of ways, from enabling cheating to spreading spam and artificially inflating friend / follower numbers.

A further breakdown of the data reveals 199,000 proactive enforcements taken by Xbox involving adult sexual content, 87,000 for fraud, and 54,000 for harassment or bullying. The report also claims that 100 percent of all actions in the last six-month period relating to account tampering, piracy, and phishing were taken proactively by Xbox rather than via reports made by its player base, which suggests that either fewer issues are being reported by players or the issues themselves are being addressed before players are aware of them. As proactive action has increased, the report also reveals that reports made by players have decreased significantly despite a growing player base, noting a 36 percent decline in player reports compared to the same period in 2021. A total of 33.07 million reports were made by players during the last period, with the vast majority relating to either in-game conduct (such as cheating, teamkilling, or intentionally throwing a match) or communications.

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Crypto Meltdown Continues, Next Up: BlockFi

Long-time Slashdot reader kid_wonder writes: BlockFi, a crypto exchange, had suspended withdrawals on Friday and now appears to be having serious issues directly related to the FTX meltdown. In an email to customers this morning they said: “The rumors that a majority of BlockFi assets are custodied at FTX are false. That said, we do have significant exposure to FTX and associated corporate entities that encompasses obligations owed to us by Alameda, assets held at FTX.com, and undrawn amounts from our credit line with FTX US. While we will continue to work on recovering all obligations owed to BlockFi, we expect that the recovery of the obligations owed to us by FTX will be delayed as FTX works through the bankruptcy process.

At this time, withdrawals from BlockFi continue to be paused. We also continue to ask clients not to submit any deposits to BlockFi Wallet or Interest Accounts.” Reuters has a list of some firms who have given information about their exposure to FTX.

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A New Website Backed By Al Gore Tracks Big Polluters By Name

A new global tracker created by the nonprofit Climate Trace is helping to make clear exactly where major greenhouse gas emissions are originating. According to NPR, the interactive map “uses a combination of satellites, sensors and machine learning to measure the top polluters worldwide.” From the report: It observes how much greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — are being emitted at specific locations, such as power plants and oil refineries. Former Vice President Al Gore, who is a founding member of the initiative, said it is meant to serve as a more reliable and accurate alternative to companies self-reporting their emissions estimates. “Cheating is impossible with this artificial intelligence method, because they would have to somehow falsify multiple sets of data,” he told NPR’s Michel Martin on All Things Considered.

The emissions tool employs over 300 satellites; sensors on land, planes and ships; as well as artificial intelligence to build models of emission estimates. Right now, it tracks about 72,000 of the highest emitting greenhouse gas sources. That includes every power plant, large ship and large plane in the entire world, Gore said. And that’s just the beginning. By next year, Gore hopes to be tracking millions of major emitting sites. “We will have essentially all of them,” he said. Gore said 75% of the world’s greenhouse emissions come from countries that have made pledges to become carbon-neutral by 2050. “Now that they know exactly where it’s coming from, they have tools that will enable them to reduce their emissions,” he told NPR.

He added that the database, which is free and accessible online, can help inform countries about how much pollution is being emitted by the companies they are working with or considering working with. It is not enough for companies to self-report, he said. For instance, Climate Trace found that the oil and gas industry has been significantly underreporting its emissions. That doesn’t mean companies were intentionally cheating, Gore added. However, he said underreporting prevents governments and the public from staying on track with their net-zero pledge. Six regional governments in Mexico, Europe and Africa have already entered into working agreements for using the tool, Gore said.

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Seagate Announces Dual-Actuator MACH.2 Drive – and Star Wars, Black Panther Themed Drives

An anonymous reader writes that Seagate Technology has launched its second generation dual actuator MACH.2 series hard drives. “Computing power, storage capacities, and storage performance: all must continue moving forward in order for technology innovators to solve humanity’s greatest challenges,” boasts Seagate’s page for the drives:

MACH.2 is the world’s first multi-actuator hard drive technology, containing two independent actuators that transfer data concurrently. MACH.2 solves the need for increased performance by enabling parallelism of data flows in and out of a single hard drive. By allowing the data center host computer to request and receive data from two areas of the drive simultaneously, MACH.2 doubles the IOPS performance of each individual hard drive…. MACH.2 provides up to 2x performance — with two independent actuators and data paths, it enables concurrent I/O streams to and from the host.
Seagate claims it offers “optimal latency” by improving sequential peformance to double data transfer rates over single-actuator drives.
And in other news, Seagate is selling hard drives with commemorative Star Wars themes, including the Mandalorian drive, the Grogu drive, and the Boba Fett drive. (It’s in addition to Seagate’s officially licensed external drive for God of War Ragnarök — optimised for PS4 and PS5, delivering “the ability to play PS4 games directly from the drive.”) Seagate also made drives commemorating Marvel’s Avengers and Spider-Man, and now has new drives for Marvel’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever .

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Douglas Adams was Right. Science Journal Proves 42 Is the Address of the Universe

Slashdot reader Informativity writes: First published in Jan. ’21, a new publication entitled Measurement Quantization affirms the #42 is the address of our universe (Appx. AC), a distinguishing feature of our construct that ultimately answers the question to life, the universe and everything – from a physicist’s point-of-view. Importantly, the International Journal of Geometric Methods in Modern Physics – is a top-tier journal indexed to NASA’s Astronomical Data System (ADS), the after peer review version of arXiv.org. With just over 500 equations, the paper resolves a comprehensive physical description of dark energy, dark matter, discrete gravity, and unification. Resolving over 30 outstanding problems in modern physics, the paper derives the physical constants from first principles, demonstrates the physical significance of Planck’s units, resolves discrete versions of SR and GR, derives the equivalence principle, presents a parameter free description of early universe events, discovers a new form of length contraction not related to Einstein’s relativity and identifies the discrete state of our universe – 42. Forty-two is what defines our universe from any other version of a universe. It also determines the rate of expansion and the ground state orbital of an atom, thus reducing the number of stable universes as we understand them to just a few. So, while Douglas Adams may have just been randomly picking numbers when writing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, perhaps we also live in a universe that likes to humor itself.

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Survey of 26K Developers Finds Java, Python, Kotlin, and Rust Growing Rapidly

While the popularity of jQuery is decreasing, React.JS “is currently the most widely used client-side framework,” reports ZDNet, citing SlashData’s 23rd State of the Developer Nation report (compiled from more than 26,000 developers last summer from 163 countries).

ZDNet believe it shows developers “experimenting less and sticking with what they know and what works.”

JavaScript remains the largest programming language community, SlashData found. According to its research, there are an estimated 19.6 million developers worldwide using JavaScript every day in everything from web development and mobile apps to backend coding, cloud and game design. Java, meanwhile, is growing rapidly. In the last two years, the size of the Java community has more than doubled from 8.3 million to 16.5 million, SlashData found. For perspective, the global developer population grew about half as fast over the same period….

Python also continued to grow strongly, adding about eight million new developers over the last two years, according to SlashData. It accredited the rise of data science and machine learning as “a clear factor in Python’s growing popularity”. Approximately 63% of machine-learning developers and data scientists report using Python, whereas less than 15% use R, another programming language often associated with data science.

Both the Kotlin and Rust communities doubled in size in the past two years, the article points out. But according to the survey, only 9% of developers were involved in blockchain technologies.

Yet 27% of respondents reported they were learning about (if not currently working on) cryptocurrency-based projects. ZDNet summarizes the findings:

Of the three blockchain technologies covered in the report, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were found to be of least interest to developers: 58% showed “no interest” in NFTs, which SlashData said was “likely due to its perception as a novelty”.

The report found that one-quarter (25%) of developers currently work on, or are learning about, blockchain applications other than cryptocurrencies.

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