feed on feeds - 2017/08/09 - items 0 to 15

A better treatment for Alzheimer's patients may be on the horizon thanks to new research from MIT. Researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have discovered that they can reverse memory loss in mice by blocking an enzyme called HDAC2. From the study: For several years, scientists and pharmaceutical companies have been trying to develop drugs that block this enzyme, but most of these drugs also block other members of the HDAC family, which can lead to toxic side effects. The MIT team has now found a way to precisely target HDAC2, by blocking its interaction with a binding partner called Sp3. "This is exciting because for the first time we have found a specific mechanism by which HDAC2 regulates synaptic gene expression," says Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the study's senior author. Blocking that mechanism could offer a new way to treat memory loss in Alzheimer's patients. In this study, the researchers used a large protein fragment to interfere with HDAC-2, but they plan to seek smaller molecules that would be easier to deploy as drugs. Picower Institute postdocs Hidekuni Yamakawa, Jemmie Cheng, and Jay Penney are the lead authors of the study, which appears in the Aug. 8 edition of Cell Reports.

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Spokesman confirms FBI searched Paul Manafort's residence after US media reported agents seized documents in July raid.

During a new episode of The Talk Show podcast on Daring Fireball, John Gruber touched on the topic of the open floor plans that Apple has implemented within its new campus, Apple Park. A WSJ profile of Jony Ive, where he talked about Apple Park, mentioned how programmers, engineers, and other employees had already expressed concerns about working in such an environment. Gruber shared what he has heard: I heard that when floor plans were announced, that there was some meeting with [Apple Vice President] Johny Srouji's team. He's in charge of Apple's silicon, the A10, the A11, all of their custom silicon. Obviously a very successful group at Apple, and a large growing one with a lot on their shoulders. When he [Srouji] was shown the floor plans, he was more or less just "F--- that, f--- you, f--- this, this is bulls---." And they built his team their own building, off to the side on the campus ... My understanding is that that building was built because Srouji was like, 'F--- this, my team isn't working like this.'"

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Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: Jason Needham, 45, of Arlington, Tennessee was sentenced last week to 18 months in prison and two years of supervised release for hacking his former company's FTP server and the email account of one of his former colleagues. Needham did all the hacking after he left his former employer, Allen & Hoshall (A&H), a design and engineering firm for which he worked until 2013. Needham left to create his own company named HNA Engineering together with a business partner. HNA is also a design and engineering firm. According to court documents obtained by Bleeping Computer, between May 2014 and March 2016, Needham hacked into the email account of one of his former co-workers. From this account, the FBI says Needham took sensitive business information, company fee structures, marketing plans, project proposals, and lists of credentials for A&H's FTP server. A&H rotated its FTP credentials every six months, but Needham acquired new logins from his former colleague's email account.