#Ashley Madison passwords cracked More than 11 million passwords stolen from the Ashley Madison infidelity dating website have been decoded,
says a password cracking group. When stolen data from the site was dumped first, the encrypted passwords were said to be almost uncrackable because of the way they were scrambled.
But programming changes by the site's developers meant more than a third of the passwords were protected poorly.
The cracking group said it would not be sharing the decoded passwords. However, it had detailed the method it used to get at the passwords
which would make it straightforward for criminal hackers to replicate the work. This may mean those who reused their Ashley Madison password could see other accounts breached.
The Ashley Madison website was breached by a group of hackers called The Impact Team which stole gigabytes of data including login names and passwords of more than 30 million users.
Initial analysis of the data dump showed that the passwords were stored on a database after they had been protected using a process known as hashing that employs the bcrypt algorithm.
The way this scrambles passwords makes it hard to carry out so-called"brute force"attacks that try lots of different word
and letter combinations because hashing with bcrypt takes a lot of computer power. As a result a brute force attack on the passwords would take years.
However, an amateur password cracking group called Cynosure Prime looking through code also stolen from Ashley Madison realised that at some point the site changed the way passwords were stored.
In a blogpost, the group said it had found two insecure functions in the site code that meant it was"able to gain enormous speed boosts in cracking the bcrypt hashed passwords".
and changes the site made to passwords when they were entered by users. By focussing on these vulnerable steps the group has managed already to decipher 11.2 million passwords
and is hopeful it can crack a total of more than 15 million which were scrambled with the insecure functions.
The remaining passwords from the site are not susceptible to this attack because they were hashed by code lacking the insecure functions.
The group said it would not be releasing the passwords it had recovered to"protect end users".
It speculated to news site Ars Technica that the insecure hashing system was introduced to ensure that users could log in to the site quickly y
There's the charismatic Satya Nadella in charge at Microsoft. There's the 10-year-strong reign of Shantanu Narayen at the top of Adobe.
And more recently, Sundar Pichai took over as chief executive of Google-a role many said had been years coming.
Indians in California say it's the blend of temperament and competitive spirit that brings success their way."
Outside the stadium, that enthusiasm was on full display-though not without the accompaniment of a strong protest against his government.
Mr Modi's plans to get a billion more Indians on the internet, they say that's a front to mass surveillance.
"by which he meant fibre internet, connecting each and every Indian town and village. Earlier on Sunday, Mr Modi spent time with someone who could help,
taking part in a Q&a with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. It was decidedly more A than Q,
a staged display designed to build his reputation as a man of the people. The meeting at Facebook was mutually beneficial.
Mr Zuckerberg, keen as ever to expand Facebook's user base and global influence, talked up the prospect of connecting a billion more Indians to the internet.
In one of the most pointed exchanges in the entire session, Mr Modi said he hoped Mr Zuckerberg's motivations weren't purely about Facebook's bank balance.
For Mr Modi, this entire Silicon valley visit is a chance to put a little pressure on the tech giants.
He wants India to graduate from being home to the low-end of the tech trade-call centres
and cheap labour-and instead an attractive place to start a technology business. Indeed, he wants India to be a great place to start any kind of business,
and reverse the trend of great minds, particularly in tech, heading to California. One parent outside the SAP Center,
#Electricity from the air-Drayson's big idea Free energy from the air. It sounds like a fantasy but that is
"allowing low energy devices from wearables to sensors to operate without being plugged in. The technology involves harvesting radio frequency energy from existing wireless and broadcast networks, from 4g to digital television.
Lord Drayson says it's a world first:""It doesn't require any extra infrastructure,
it doesn't require us to transmit any extra energy, it's recycling the energy
which isn't being used at the moment.""The technology was demonstrated in the lecture theatre at the Royal Institution,
where Michael Faraday worked on electromagnetism in the 19th century. Lord Drayson first showed how much radio frequency energy was in the room,
and then used his Freevolt system to power a loudspeaker. He also demonstrated the first product to use the energy system,
a personal air pollution monitor called the Cleanspace tag. It has been created by Drayson Technologies as part of a drive to improve air quality in cities
and give individuals some insights into the extent of pollution. A battery in the device is recharged continually by a Freevolt energy harvester.
The technology which has been patented, could now be used by organisations such as supermarkets which are preparing for the next phase of the internet,
where billions of small cheap sensors are online providing data about their operations. But Dean Bubley, a mobile technology analyst and founder of Disruptive Analysis, is cautious about the prospects for Freevolt.
After watching the demonstration he tells me the idea of air-quality sensors and crowdsourced monitoring is"fascinating".
"But he says"it doesn't need Freevolt. The same thing could be achieved with a battery and low-power transmitter."
"He says there are also questions to answer about the possible impact on the mobile networks, which own the spectrum that Freevolt would be harvesting,
suggesting that that the"free"energy might actually be needed for communication. I put it to Lord Drayson that the networks might demand a fee.
He is confident that there is no legal basis for that and indeed is confident they would see his technology as a"really cool thing".
"He says it"closed the loop"on the internet of things and the industry would embrace it
because it did not involve building more infrastructure. Others have tried the same idea, but have struggled to produce energy with enough efficiency to make the technology commercially viable.
Now this British company believes it has found a solution. If it is right, then Freevolt could turn into a very lucrative business s
#Definitive tests for irritable bowel syndrome developed at Cedars-Sinai Millions of people afflicted by irritable bowel syndrome can now be diagnosed quickly
and accurately with two simple blood tests developed by a Cedars-Sinai gastroenterologist. The tests, created by Mark Pimentel, MD,
when a patient has developed IBS because of food poisoning, a major cause of the disorder. Toxins produced by bacteria,
and amount of specific antibodies reacting to the toxins.""Having an early diagnosis means patients can avoid years of invasive tests and visits to specialists that often leave them with more questions than answers,
"he said.""With these new blood tests, many patients will now be proceed able to right to therapy for their condition."
"IBS is the most common gastroenterological disorder in the United states, affecting nearly 40 million people.
and bouts of relentless diarrhea, constipation, or both. Fatigue and the stress of trying to plan one's life around visits to the bathroom can be debilitating.
A multicenter study validating the accuracy of the new blood tests,"Development and Validation of a Biomarker for Diarrhea-Predominant Irritable bowel syndrome in Human Subjects"
was published this week in the journal PLOS ONE. Pimentel will also present the research on Sunday, May 17th, at Digestive Disease Week 2015 in Washington,
D c. Pimentel and fellow researchers studied nearly 3, 000 people, comparing IBS patients to those diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease and those with no GI disease.
The blood tests identified the two antibodies associated with IBS--anti-Cdtb and anti-vinculin--with greater than 90 percent certainty.
The tests are marketed under the name IBSCHEK #and are produced by Commonwealth Laboratories Inc.,in Salem, Massachusetts."
or another that the disease was psychological, all in their head,"said Pimentel.""The fact that we can now confirm the disease through their blood,
not their head, is going to end a lot of the emotional suffering I have seen these patients endure."
developed by Pimentel to detect both anti-Cdtb and anti-vinculin antibodies in the diagnosis of irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease.
#New age of genome editing could lead to cure for sickle cell anemia Australia researchers have shown that changing just a single letter of the DNA of human red blood cells in the laboratory increases their production of oxygen-carrying haemoglobin-a world-first
advance that could lead to a cure for sickle cell anaemia and other blood disorders. The new genome editing technique, in which a beneficial, naturally-occurring genetic mutation is introduced into cells,
works by switching on a sleeping gene that is active in the womb but turned off in most people after birth."
"An exciting new age of genome editing is beginning, now that single genes within our vast genome can be precisely cut and repaired,
"says study leader, Dean of Science at UNSW, Professor Merlin Crossley.""Our laboratory study provides a proof of concept that changing just one letter of DNA in a gene could alleviate the symptoms of sickle cell anaemia and thalassaemia-inherited diseases in
which people have damaged haemoglobin.""Because the good genetic variation we introduced already exists in nature, this approach should be effective and safe.
However more research is needed before it can be tested in people as a possible cure for serious blood diseases."
"The study, by Professor Crossley, UNSW Phd student Beeke Wienert, and colleagues, is published in the journal Nature Communications.
People produce two different kinds of haemoglobin-the vital molecule that picks up oxygen in the lungs and transports it around the body."
"During development in the womb, the foetal haemoglobin gene is switched on. This produces foetal haemoglobin,
"says Professor Crossley.""After we are born, the foetal haemoglobin gene is shut off and the adult haemoglobin gene is switched on."
"Mutations affecting adult haemoglobin are among the most common of all human genetic mutations, with about five per cent of the world's population carrying a defective adult haemoglobin gene.
and suffer from life-threatening diseases such as sickle cell anaemia and thalassaemia, which require lifelong treatment with blood transfusions and medication.
The researchers based their new approach on the fact that a small number of people with damaged adult haemoglobin have an additional, beneficial mutation in the foetal haemoglobin gene."
"This good mutation keeps their foetal haemoglobin gene switched on for the whole of their lives,
and reduces their symptoms significantly, "says Professor Crossley. The researchers introduced this single-letter mutation into human red blood cells using genome-editing proteins known as TALENS,
which can be designed to cut a gene at a specific point, as well as providing the desired piece of donor DNA for insertion."
"Breaks in DNA can be lethal to cells, so they have inbuilt machinery to repair any nicks as soon as possible,
"says Professor Crossley.""We exploited this effect. When our genome editing protein cuts the DNA,
the cell quickly replaces it with the donor DNA that we have provided also.""The team includes researchers from UNSW, the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, and Stanford university.
If the genome-editing technique is shown to work effectively in blood stem cells and be safe,
it would offer significant advantages over other approaches, such as conventional gene therapy, in which viruses are used to ferry healthy genes into a cell to replace the defective ones.
The genetic changes to cells would not be inherited, making the approach very different to recent controversial Chinese research in which the DNA of human embryos was altered d
#Atomic view of microtubules Microtubules, hollow fibers of tubulin protein only a few nanometers in diameter, form the cytoskeletons of living cells
"Through a combination of high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy (CRYO EM) and a unique methodology for image analysis, a team of researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California (UC) Berkeley has produced an atomic view of microtubules
and reform into spindles that are used by the dividing cell to move chromosomes. For chromosome migration to occur,
the microtubules attached to them must disassemble, carrying the chromosomes in the process. The dynamic instability that makes it possible for microtubules to transition from a rigid polymerized
or"assembled"nucleotide state to a flexible depolymerized or"disassembled"nucleotide state is driven by guanosine triphosphate (GTP) hydrolysis in the microtubule lattice."
a biophysicist with Berkeley Lab's Life sciences Division who led this research. Nogales, who is also a professor of biophysics
and structural biology at UC Berkeley and investigator with the Howard hughes medical institute, is a leading authority on the structure and dynamics of microtubules.
In this latest study, she and her group used CRYO EM in which protein samples are flash-frozen at liquid nitrogen temperatures to preserve their natural structure,
to determine microtubule structures in different nucleotide states with and without EB3. With CRYO EM and their image analysis methodology, they achieved a resolution of 3. 5 Angstroms, a record for microtubules.
For perspective, the diameter of a hydrogen atom is about 1. 0 Angstroms.""We can now study the atomic details of microtubule polymerization
and depolymerization to develop a complete description of microtubule dynamics, "Nogales says. Beyond their importance to our understanding of basic cell biology, microtubules are a major target for anticancer drugs, such as Taxol,
which can prevent the transition from growing to shrinking nucleotide states or vice versa.""A better understanding of how microtubule dynamic instability is regulated could open new opportunities for improving the potency and selectivity of existing anticancer drugs,
#Early warning gene signature for Alzheimer's A'gene signature'that could be used to predict the onset of diseases, such as Alzheimer's,
years in advance has been developed in research published in the open access journal Genome Biology. The study aimed to define a set of genes associated with'healthy ageing'in 65 year olds.
Such a molecular profile could be useful for distinguishing people at earlier risk of age-related diseases.
This could improve upon the use of chronological age and complement traditional indicators of disease, such as blood pressure.
Lead author James Timmons from King's college London, UK, said:""We use birth year, or chronological age, to judge everything from insurance premiums to
whether you get a medical procedure or not. Most people accept that all 60 year olds are not the same,
but there has been no reliable test for underlying'biological age'."'"Our discovery provides the first robust molecular'signature'of biological age in humans
and should be able to transform the way that'age'is used to make medical decisions.
This includes identifying those more likely to be at risk of Alzheimer's, as catching those at'early'risk is key to evaluating potential treatments."
and used the information to develop a signature of 150 RNA genes that indicated'healthy ageing'.
'The signature was found to be a reliable predictor for risk of age-related disease when studying RNA from tissues including human muscle, brain and skin.
The researchers studied RNA from healthy 70 year old subjects and analyzed follow-up health data over two decades.
In particular, they demonstrated that patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease had altered an'healthy ageing'RNA signature in their blood,
and therefore a lower healthy age gene score, suggesting significant association with the disease. Timmons added:"
and the brain regions associated with dementia, and it can help contribute to a dementia diagnosis. This also provides strong evidence that dementia in humans could be called a type of'accelerated ageing
'or'failure to activate the healthy ageing program'."'"Given that early intervention is important in Alzheimer's
and there is a need to identify those at greatest risk, the authors say that their'healthy age gene score'could be integrated to help decide which middle-aged subjects could be offered entry into a preventative clinical trial many years before the clinical expression of Alzheimer's s
New CRISPR-Cas9 strategy edits genes 2 ways The CRISPR-Cas9 system has been in the limelight mainly as a revolutionary genome engineering tool used to modify specific gene sequences within the vast sea of an organism
genome engineering and gene regulation, are initiated with a common step: the Cas9 protein is recruited to targeted genes by the so-called matching sequences of"GUIDE RNA"that help Cas9 latch on to specific sequences of DNA in a given genome.
But until now, genome engineering and gene regulation required different variants of the Cas9 protein; while the former task hinges on Cas9's innate DNA-cleaving activity,
the latter has been achieved by engineered Cas9 variants that have had their DNA-cleaving"fangs"removed, but still retain their ability to latch onto a specific genomic target.
These latter Cas9 variants are fused commonly with proteins that regulate gene expression. Now, using a new approach developed by researchers led by George Church, Ph d.,of Harvard and Ron Weiss, Ph d.,of the Massachusetts institute of technology,
The method opens up unexpected possibilities for understanding diseases and drug mechanisms. The study's findings are reported in the September 7 issue of Nature Methods.
Church is Core Faculty member at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical school and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT,
and Weiss is Professor of Biological engineering and also Professor of Electrical engineering and Computer science at MIT.
Ph d.,Wyss Institute Core Faculty member and the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and Professor of Biological engineering at MIT, is also a co-investigator
"We decided to systematically test why it was that truncating guides too much caused Cas9 to no longer cut the intended genomic site,
we can now for the first time toggle a single protein to gain direct control over both, gene sequences and gene expression,
We envision future uses for the technology that can help decipher the tangled web of interactions underlying for example cancer drug resistance and stem cell differentiation,
"This new functionality will improve our ability to decipher the complex relationships between interdependent genes responsible for many diseases,
-while safeguarding the"microbial workers"from infection by other microbes and pathogens.""Cas9 has emerged as a revolutionary tool allowing us to conquer new biomedical and industrial territory.
This team's findings harness yet another level of control and versatility in gene editing
. who is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical school and Boston Children's Hospital and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of engineering and Applied sciences s
or mechanical stress on the chromosomes into which our genetic material is packaged. To make sure cells stay alive
--and in a study published online in Nature Chemical Biology on September 7, researchers at The Rockefeller University uncover new aspects of it."
"Our findings are revealing more clues about the intricacies of DNA repair, "says study author Ralph Kleiner,
a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Chemistry and Cell biology, led by Tarun Kapoor.""We now know how key proteins get where they need to be to facilitate the process.""
""This is also a nice example of how innovative chemical approaches can help decipher fundamental biological mechanisms,
who serves as Pels Family Professor at Rockefeller. When DNA strands break, the cell ideally puts them back together
For instance, different regions of a chromosome can fuse together, causing genes to rearrange themselves --and such chromosome fusions can lead to diseases such as cancer.
To learn more about the process, Kapoor, Kleiner and their colleagues zeroed in on the sites in chromosomes where DNA repair happens.
Specifically they focused on a single histone, a type of protein that DNA wraps around to make up chromosomes.
This histone, H2ax, is known to be involved in DNA repair. Immediately after DNA damage occurs, H2ax gets a mark--it becomes tagged with a chemical moiety known as a phosphate.
This process, called phosphorylation, occurs at sites of broken DNA as a way to mediate interactions between key proteins.
This interaction helps bring 53bp1 to the site of DNA damage, where it mediates the repair of double-stranded breaks in DNA by encouraging the repair machinery to glue the two ends back together."
MURATA Yoji at the Kobe University Graduate school of Medicine Division of Molecular and Cellular Signaling, were the first to demonstrate the role of stomach cancer-associated protein tyrosine phosphatase (SAP)- 1 in the pathogenesis and prevention of Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis,
are expected to accelerate the development of targeted therapies for inflammatory gastrointestinal diseases. Inflammatory bowel diseases, such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, are disorders of unknown etiology that are characterized often by abdominal pain, diarrhea, bloody stool, fever,
and weight loss. These symptoms frequently interfere with activities of daily living and place patients at an elevated risk of mortality.
Patients are associated also with a high risk of developing colorectal cancer. In Japan, there are an estimated 200,000 patients with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis,
who qualify for the special Government-led medical assistance system for intractable diseases. Currently the administration of anti-inflammatory agents only provides palliative results,
and the medical community is awaiting new definitive therapies. Although recent studies have demonstrated that intestinal epithelial cells play a critical role in regulating bowel inflammation,
the underlying mechanism remains largely unknown. Previously, Prof. MATOZAKI, Assistant Prof. MURATA, and their colleagues found that SAP-1 localizes to the microvilli of the brush border in gastrointestinal epithelial cells.
Here, they showed that SAP-1 ablation in a mouse model of inflammatory bowel disease resulted in a marked increase in the incidence and severity of bowel inflammation
suggesting that SAP-1 plays a protective role against colitis. In addition, carcinoembryonic antigen-related cell adhesion molecule (CEACAM) 20,
Suppression of CEACAM20 functions via dephosphorylation was suggested to contribute to preventing colitis. By shedding light on the anti-inflammatory mechanism of the intestinal epithelial cells, Prof.
and CEACAM20 to overcome intractable inflammatory bowel diseases. Prof. MATOZAKI stated, "Since the discovery of SAP-1 at Kobe University in 1994,
we have clarified its major function thanks to the efforts of many joint researchers. Our future research interests are centered on the development of new therapeutics for inflammatory bowel disease that take advantage of our understanding of SAP-1 and CEACAM20 functions
#Detecting HIV diagnostic antibodies with DNA nanomachines New research may revolutionize the slow, cumbersome and expensive process of detecting the antibodies that can help with the diagnosis of infectious and autoimmune diseases.
New research may revolutionize the slow, cumbersome and expensive process of detecting the antibodies that can help with the diagnosis of infectious and autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and HIV.
An international team of researchers have designed and synthetized a nanometer scale DNA"machine "whose customized modifications enable it to recognize a specific target antibody.
Their new approach, which they described this month in Angewandte Chemie, promises to support the development of rapid,
low-cost antibody detection at the point-of-care, eliminating the treatment initiation delays and increasing healthcare costs associated with current techniques.
The binding of the antibody to the DNA machine causes a structural change (or switch),
which generates a light signal. The sensor does need not to be activated chemically and is rapid-acting within five minutes-enabling the targeted antibodies to be detected easily, even in complex clinical samples such as blood serum."
"One of the advantages of our approach is that it is said highly versatile Prof. Francesco Ricci, of the University of Rome, Tor Vergata, senior co-author of the study."
"This DNA nanomachine can be modified in fact custom so that it can detect a huge range of antibodies,
this makes our platform adaptable for many different diseases"."""Our modular platform provides significant advantages over existing methods for the detection of antibodies,"added Prof.
Vallée-Bélisle of the University of Montreal, the other senior co-author of the paper.""It is rapid,
does not require reagent chemicals, and may prove to be useful in a range of different applications such as point-of-care diagnostics and bioimaging"."
""Another nice feature of our this platform is said its low-cost Prof. Kevin Plaxco of the University of California, Santa barbara."
"The materials needed for one assay cost about 15 cents, making our approach very competitive in comparison with other quantitative approaches.""
""We are excited by these preliminary results, but we are looking forward to improve our sensing platform even more"said Simona Ranallo, a Phd student in the group of Prof.
Ricci at the University of Rome and first-author of the paper.""For example, we could adapt our platform
so that the signal of the nanoswitch may be read using a mobile phone. This will make our approach really available to anyone!
We are working on this idea and we would like to start involving diagnostic companies. e
#HIV cure research: NIH scientists create 2-headed protein to deplete HIV reservoir Scientists at the National institutes of health (NIH) have created a protein that awakens resting immune cells infected with HIV
and facilitates their destruction in laboratory studies. The protein potentially could contribute to a cure for HIV infection by helping deplete the reservoir of long-lived,
latently HIV-infected cells that can start making the virus when a person stops taking anti-HIV drugs.
Further studies in animals and people are needed to determine the viability of this approach. The researchers found that the protein, called VRC07-acd3
triggered the activation and killing of latently HIV-infected helper T cells when the cells were taken from patients on antiretroviral therapy
and then incubated in the lab with the patients'own killer T cells. In addition, the scientists found a monkey-adapted version of the protein to be safe and well-tolerated
when given to monkeys infected with a simian form of HIV and receiving antiretroviral therapy.
and the other--based on an antibody called VRC07--powerfully binds to more than 90 percent of HIV strains.
A team of scientists at the Vaccine Research center (VRC) of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases, part of NIH, created VRC07-acd3 under the leadership of VRC Director John R. Mascola, M d.;
and Richard A. Koup, M d.,VRC deputy director and chief of its immunology laboratory a
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