"However small the probability of seeing a signal from E.T. is, those chances are soon going to be a lot better than they have been in the past," reports Smithsonian magazine: Sure, after decades of listening, there is still no message. But with more data to sift through, and new technologies with superior search capabilities, odds of hearing from E.T. are rapidly improving. If the probability in the decade 2011 - 2021 were x percent, it's going to be 1,000 times x in the following decade, says Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center. (SETI stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.) The reason for E.T. optimism stems largely from several new projects in the works, enhanced with advanced methods for discerning an actual message hidden in the static of cosmic cacophony... Jill Tarter, chair emeritus for SETI Research at the pioneering SETI Institute, described new search projects in the works at the institute, including Laser SETI. It's a plan to train 96 cameras at a dozen locations around the world to keep a constant vigil for "intelligent" optical signals from space... [And] recent developments in artificial intelligence research should soon make machine learning an effective tool in the E.T. search, Tarter said at the AAAS meeting. "The ability to use machine learning to help us find signals in noise I think is really exciting," she said. "Historically we've asked a machine to tell us if a particular pattern in frequency and time could be found. But now we're on the brink of being able to say to the machine, 'Are there any patterns in there?'" So it's possible that an artificially intelligent computer might be the first earthling to discern a message from an extraterrestrial. But then we would have to wonder, would a smart machine detecting a message bother to tell us? That might depend on whom (or what) the message was from. "I think there's something particularly romantic," said Siemion, "about the idea of machine learning and artificial intelligence looking for extraterrestrial intelligence which itself might be artificially intelligent." The article also notes that SETI researchers "have long agreed that if a signal is detected, no response would be made until a global consensus had been reached on who will speak for Earth and what they would say. "But that agreement is totally unenforceable..."

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New header image. Part of a photo from the National Archives of an emergency hospital for influenza patients in Brookline, MA. Previous image was a snowy mountaintop in the Catskills.

The World Health Organization believes air pollution kills seven million people each year. But will this year be different? Forbes reports: The global lockdown inspired by the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, has shuttered factories and reduced travel, slashing lethal pollution including the greenhouse gases that are heating the climate. The lockdown may save more lives from pollution reduction than are threatened by the virus itself, said François Gemenne, director of The Hugo Observatory, which studies the interactions between environmental changes, human migration, and politics. "Strangely enough, I think the death toll of the coronavirus at the end of the day might be positive, if you consider the deaths from atmospheric pollution," said Gemenne, citing, for example, the 48,000 people who die annually in France because of atmospheric pollution and the more than one million in China... "More than likely the number of lives that would be spared because of these confinement measures would be higher than the number of lives that would be lost because of the pandemic," Gemenne said in an appearance on France 24's The Debate. The discrepancy in how we react to these divergent threats should give us pause, Gemenne said, to consider why it is that we respond so strongly to one with less lethality and so weakly to one with more.

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Two doctors I admire and trust have told me what my mother told me years ago. Take Vitamin D. It helps the body fight acute respiratory infection. Also, get outside, get sun and exercise.

Founded in 2008, BibBase offers a free web service that lets scientists create a page of their publications that can then be embedded into other web sites. Now long-time Slashdot moglito describes BibBase's newest project: Slashdot readers might be interested in a tool that we at BibBase.org have created for tracking the evolution of COVID-19 in different countries and regions. It is based on the same data the Johns Hopkins map uses, but allows tracking individual regions (to the degree the data is up to date). [Disclaimer: Most of us aren't data-vetting scientists. Consider the below just one possible grass-roots interpretation of the data.] Using this web app it is for instance possible to see that some countries have been able to break the exponential growth in cases. This preselection for instance shows China, South Korea, Norway, and Italy on a log-scale. It is visible from this that after China, also South Korea has been able to curb the spread, and now Norway is showing signs of that as well. In contrast, Italy still seems nowhere near the turning point. We hope that this tool can help people as well as decision makers understand the relative effectiveness of the approaches used by these countries to curb the spread. We believe it also shows the importance of testing (which has been very good in South Korea). More importantly perhaps to readers, we feel that this is a sign of hope that it is possible to get this under control and that everyone should feel motivated to abide by the strict self distancing we are all trying to enforce. Signs of hope seem rare these days, so we wanted to share this. The BibBase blog has more information, noting that "the current data set seems to be missing data from the U.S. until just recently, which reflects in unreasonably abrupt increases in the charts for the U.S. and its states."

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Enoch Choi: "With Cuomo’s request for military support, I expect the army to deploy DMAT hospitals to hardest hit areas in coming days, NY, WA, CA. They deployed to Katrina when my dad and I were the first in St Bernard to arrive. Praying for my friends who volunteer in them. The demand outstripped availability there, and I expect the same as what happened then, that churches will serve the vast majority, since Red Cross/NGOs will be outstripped in capacity as well."

Malware distributors "have started disseminating real-time, accurate information about global infection rates tied to the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic in a bid to infect computers with malicious software," reports security researcher Brian Krebs: In one scheme, an interactive dashboard of Coronavirus infections and deaths produced by Johns Hopkins University is being used in malicious Web sites (and possibly spam emails) to spread password-stealing malware. Late last month, a member of several Russian language cybercrime forums began selling a digital Coronavirus infection kit that uses the Hopkins interactive map as part of a Java-based malware deployment scheme. The kit costs $200 if the buyer already has a Java code signing certificate, and $700 if the buyer wishes to just use the seller's certificate. "It loads [a] fully working online map of Corona Virus infected areas and other data," the seller explains. "Map is resizable, interactive, and has real time data from World Health Organization and other sources. Users will think that PreLoader is actually a map, so they will open it and will spread it to their friends and it goes viral...!" The sales thread claims the customer's payload can be bundled with the Java-based map into a filename that most Webmail providers allow in sent messages... The seller says the user/victim has to have Java installed for the map and exploit to work, but that it will work even on fully patched versions of Java... It's unclear how many takers this seller has had, but earlier this week security experts began warning of new malicious Web sites being stood up that used interactive versions of the same map to distract visitors while the sites tried to foist the password-stealing AZORult malware.

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"The United States Department of Justice has charged two New Jersey men with using drones to sneak drugs and other contraband into a federal prison..." reports CNN: The two men, Nicolo Denichilo, 38, and Adrian Goolcharran, 35, smuggled items including marijuana, steroids, cell phones, SIM cards, and syringes into the prison in Fort Dix, New Jersey, according to the US Attorney's Office, District of New Jersey. The prison, known as FCI Fort Dix, is a "low security federal correctional institution" that houses more than 3,000 inmates, according to its website... The Fort Dix prison officials also discovered an inmate near the drone drop site in possession of more than 30 cell phones and 50 SIM cards, among other phone equipment, the statement said... [A]uthorities said they obtained evidence of at least seven drone deliveries since July 2018 at the prison.

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Coco in San Jose: "I am so grateful for all the people still delivering the mail and packages and keeping basic services running."

An anonymous reader quotes the "Naked Security" blog of anti-virus company Sophos: Researchers have discovered another big database containing millions of European customer records left unsecured on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for anyone to find using a search engine. A total of eight million records were involved, collected via marketplace and payment system APIs belonging to companies including Amazon, eBay, Shopify, PayPal, and Stripe. Discovered by Comparitech's noted breach hunter Bob Diachenko, the AWS instance containing the MongoDB database became visible on 3 February, where it remained indexable by search engines for five days. Data in the records included names, shipping addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, items purchased, payments, order IDs, links to Stripe and Shopify invoices, and partially redacted credit cards... A total of eight million records were involved, collected via marketplace and payment system APIs belonging to companies including Amazon, eBay, Shopify, PayPal, and Stripe. The article calls it "simply the latest example of how easy it is to leave sensitive data sitting in an unsecured state on cloud storage platforms." They cite two more high-profile databases that Comparitech found exposed on Elasticsearch just in 2020: A database containing 309 million Facebook user IDs, phone numbers and names A total of 250 million Microsoft customer support records dating back to 2005

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NakedJen, in Bali: "The news changes every seventeen minutes. I am not sure where all the capes went, but what I do know is that it is us, really, who wear them best. When times get really awful, horrible, Americans know how to show up and take really good care of one another and not rely on their government or their President to do it for them."

Yvonne, a programmer, now working from home: "Hot water with lemon and cayenne in the morning. Staying home and noticing that I haven't watered the plants for a really long time. Vacuuming while waiting for the long queries to run."

Jennifer Gunter: "When a company doesn’t give their employees sick leave not only are they saying they don’t care about their employees they’re also saying they don’t care about their customers."

An anonymous reader quotes UPI: Scientists have developed a technique for repairing damaged DNA. The breakthrough, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, could pave the way for new therapies for cancer and neurodegenerative disorders. The accumulation of DNA damage is responsible for aging, cancer and neurological diseases like motor neuron disease, also known as ALS. Until now, scientists have struggled to find ways to repair this kind of damage. However, researchers have discovered a new protein called TEX264 that can combine with other enzymes to find and destroy toxic proteins that bind to DNA and trigger damage. Scientists are hoping to identify ways to use TEX264 and its protein relatives to repair the DNA damage linked with disorders like cancer and ALS. New therapies inspired by the latest research could also be used to repair the purposeful DNA damage caused by chemotherapy.

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Proving there is hope for the world, Ted Cruz tweeted something true, elegant and bi-partisan. I decided to unblock him, but not necessarily permanently.