"To celebrate Java's 25th anniversary this year and the latest release of Java 15, JetBrains has compiled data from multiple sources to look at what the current state of the language," reports SD Times: The largest concentration of Java developers is in Asia, where 2.5 million developers use it as their primary language. JetBrains believes this may be due to the fact that it is common to hire offshore developers in countries like China and India to build Android apps. "We might have expected the USA to have a high percentage of Java users, but it also makes a lot of sense that they don't. There is a big technology stack to choose from and often a lot of the tech companies are at the forefront of that stack, so it could be that developers there don't need the power or stability of Java and are using languages that allow them to build and test quickly," JetBrains wrote in a post.
The post on JetBrains notes that the six countries with the highest percentage of developers using Java as their primary language are: China, South Korea, India, Germany, Spain, and Brazil: The reasons Java is most likely so popular in the first 6 countries include the free use of Java, governmental support, and open-source... Germany is also very high which could be attributed to Java being the most popular language in Germany for software engineers as it is used to build highly scalable applications for a multitude of industries. Most enterprise services rely on Java to power the applications that enable the day-to-day running of businesses, such as payroll, inventory management, reporting, and so on. Germany also has a big financial sector that uses Java heavily for their homegrown tech, such as trading bots, retail banking systems, and other applications that the finance industry requires in order to remain competitive...

According to the State of the Developer Ecosystem Survey 2020, more than a third of professional developers use Java as a primary language and Java remains the second primary language among professional developers after JavaScript. Expert analysis: It is not surprising to see JavaScript and Java taking the leading positions as they are kind of paired together; developers who work with Java often write their frontend and any quick scripts in JavaScript. Python is probably third place due to the spread of machine learning. In general, we expect the web to be a big part of the developer ecosystem and so JavaScript, HTML and CSS, and PHP will always have solid standing. SQL is also always going to be around as there isn't much that doesn't require databases in some capacity. C++ is also kind of a solid language in that it is used for a lot of embedded applications, so it won't be disappearing off the charts any time soon. C# though seems to be losing ground, and I guess if Java is high then C# will be low, as they are both very similar in terms of capabilities.

As to why I think Java is so high in the sphere of professional development — it's similar to what was mentioned about Germany. Most enterprise business services rely on Java to make them tick along. It's not just the IT sector either — almost every company, be it in distribution, manufacturing, or banking, has IT services as part of their infrastructure, and these services, such as payroll or inventory management, are generally built with Java in the backend. So Java is used a lot by professional developers who work for these companies.

A team of scientists from the Singapore University of Technology and Design discovered that, using simple chemistry, the organic polymer chitin -- contained in the exoskeletons of insects and crustaceans -- can easily be transformed into a viable building material for basic tools and habitats. The findings have been published in the journal PLOS ONE. Ars Technica reports: "The technology was originally developed to create circular ecosystems in urban environments," said co-author Javier Fernandez. "But due to its efficiency, it is also the most efficient and scalable method to produce materials in a closed artificial ecosystem in the extremely scarce environment of a lifeless planet or satellite." [T]he authors of the current paper point out that most terrestrial manufacturing strategies that could fit the bill typically require specialized equipment and a hefty amount of energy. However, "Nature presents successful strategies of life adapting to harsh environments," the authors wrote. "In biological organisms, rigid structures are formed by integrating inorganic filler proceed from the environment at a low energy cost (e.g., calcium carbonate) and incorporated into an organic matrix (e.g., chitin) produced at a relatively high metabolic cost."

Fernandez and his colleagues maintain that chitin is likely to be part of any planned artificial ecosystem because it is so plentiful in nature. It's the primary component of fish scales and fungal cell walls, for example, as well as the exoskeletons of crustaceans and insects. In fact, insects have already been targeted as a key source of protein for a possible Martian base. And since the chitin component of insects has limited nutritional value for humans, extracting it to make building materials "does not hamper or compete with the food supply," the authors wrote. "Rather, it is a byproduct of it."

"Steve Jobs is now known for revolutionizing just about every part of the tech world, but back in 1988, he was perhaps best known for getting fired," remembers SFGate: In his first product reveal since his dismissal from Apple in 1985, Jobs unveiled a new project called NeXT at a meeting of the Boston Computer Society. An audio recording of the event was unearthed and released as part of a trove of early tech recordings released by Charles Mann, as reported in an extensive feature by Fast Company...

Computing advances included a UNIX operating system that allows multi-tasking, a one million pixel display, CD quality sound and a then unprecedented 256 MB of storage. The computer would be completely built by robots rather than a human assembly line, which he said resulted in a defect rate 10 times lower than its competitors. The partnership with academia makes even more sense once you consider the price-tag of $6,500.
Fast Company's tech editor Harry McCracken was at the 1988 event, and quotes Jobs as saying "The Macintosh architecture is going to peak next year sometime. And that means that there's enough cracks in the wall already, and enough limitations to the architecture, that the Mac's pretty much going to be everything it's ever going to be sometime next year."

Some clips are available on Soundcloud, but the full trove of tech recordings includes 200 full hours of audio and 16 more of video (available on a USB drive for $59.95) showing luminaries from the early days of personal technology. "In 1985, for instance, a month after Commodore announced its groundbreaking Amiga computer in New York City, president Tom Rattigan came to Boston to show it to BCS members and argue that it left the Mac in the dust." Other recordings include Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, Osborne computer designer Adam Osborne, and investor Esther Dyson, McCracken writes:

Jobs is on three recordings — one from his first Apple tenure, and two from NeXT. Bill Gates is on five. There are folks who were already legends (mobile-computing visionary Alan Kay, marketer extraordinaire Regis McKenna) and up-and-comers (budding PC tycoon Michael Dell, age 23). Everyone from Sony cofounder Akio Morita to psychedelics advocate and part-time technologist Timothy Leary is represented; just the Apple-related material, including CEO John Sculley talking about the company in the 21st century and Hypercard creator Bill Atkinson demoing his brainchild, is a feast...

The audio of Jobs's NeXT demo at the BCS — and dozens of other recordings — exist solely because Mann realized more than 35 years ago that the talks going on at computer user-group meetings and conferences were history in the making... In May 1982, the BCS hosted Applefest, an Apple II-centric fair that featured already-iconic Apple cofounders Jobs and Wozniak as keynote speakers. In this excerpt, fielding a question from the audience, they talk about software copy protection. Woz does so from a technical bent; Jobs, who speaks of a future involving low prices and convenient electronic distribution, sounds like he was thinking about the App Store decades before it appeared. This is rare, rare stuff; if you know of even one other example of surviving audio or video of Jobs and Wozniak talking about Apple together, I'd love to hear about it.

Popular Mechanics reports: A U.S. Air Force aircraft electronically impersonated a Malaysian plane while flying over the South China Sea this week. The RC-135W Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft flew off China's Hainan island on Tuesday, coming within 55 miles of the Chinese mainland.

The caper was outed on Twitter by a think tank operated by the Chinese government, which provided enough details for independent verification. The plane's International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Mode-S number, a 24-bit identifier assigned to all aircraft and broadcast by onboard transponder, was AE01CE. The Mode S system provides big-picture situational awareness and improves aviation safety. At some point, the plane's Mode-S number suddenly changed, from AE01CE to 750548. That's the ICAO number for an unknown Malaysian aircraft...

The RC-135W Rivet Joint is a converted Boeing 707 jetliner designed to collect electronic intelligence for later analysis... It's not clear why the RC-135W flew where it did. The flight probably coincided with Chinese military exercises, likely air or naval, or even a missile test. It's also worth pointing out that China's nuclear ballistic missile submarine force is based at Yulin on Hainan Island.

It's also not clear why the RC-135W engaged in the deception. Steffan Watkins, a Canadian open source intelligence researcher, tells Popular Mechanics. "If the reconnaissance is happening outside sovereign airspace, there is no pressing need to engage in that sort of deception. It's perfectly legal, and done in plain sight off the coast of Russia, Syria, and Crimea all the time — literally, every day there are RC-135s off the coast of Russia, with their transponders on, and broadcasting exactly who they are. I can't explain the difference with China. Why the difference in emissions posture and obfuscation....?"

The announcement is likely a warning to the Pentagon that the Chinese military sees through the deception, and that it's watching the watchers.

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: Microsoft has finally published a support document detailing its workaround for the August 2020 Patch Tuesday update for Windows 10 version 2004 that caused blue screens of deaths (BSODs) on newer Lenovo ThinkPads and broke Windows Hello biometric login... It's the same as Lenovo's earlier workaround but comes with a stern security warning from Microsoft.

Microsoft also explains how Lenovo Vantage violates Microsoft's security controls in Windows.

Users might bypass the BSOD screen, but they are endangering their computers by implementing the workaround, according to Microsoft. The workaround also affects some of Microsoft's latest security features for Windows 10, such as Hypervisor Code Integrity for shielding the OS from malicious drivers, as well as Windows Defender Credential Guard. "This workaround may make a computer or a network more vulnerable to attack by malicious users or by malicious software such as viruses. We do not recommend this workaround but are providing this information so that you can implement this workaround at your own discretion. Use this workaround at your own risk," Microsoft states....

The good news for affected ThinkPad users is that Microsoft and Lenovo are working together on a fix. However, Microsoft hasn't said when that will be available.

Scientists have produced gene-edited animals they say could serve as "super dads" or "surrogate sires." The BBC reports: The pigs, goats, cattle and mice make sperm carrying the genetic material of donor animals. The researchers used a hi-tech gene editing tool to knock out a male fertility gene in animal embryos. The animals were born sterile, but began producing sperm after an injection of sperm-producing cells from donor animals. The technique would enable surrogate males to sire offspring carrying the genetic material of valuable elite animals such as prize bulls, said a US-UK team. This would be a step towards genetically enhancing livestock to improve food production, they added. Further reading: EurekAlert

CNET describes Venus as "a toxic, overheated, crushing hellscape where nothing can survive." But they reported Friday that one astronomy team's hypothesis published last month "could prompt a reevaluation of how and where we look for life in the universe." Carl Sagan speculated about life in the clouds of Venus back in 1967, and just a few years ago, researchers suggested that strange, anomalous patterns seen when looking at the planet in ultraviolet could be explained by something like an algae or a bacteria in the atmosphere. More recently, research published last month in the journal Astrobiology, from leading astronomer Sara Seager at MIT, offers up a vision of what the life cycle above Venus might be like. Seager has been a 21st century leader in the search for exoplanets, biosignatures, and worlds similar to our own. She's currently the deputy science director for NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission (aka TESS).

Seager and her colleagues suggest that the most likely way for microbes to survive above Venus is inside liquid droplets. But such droplets don't stay still, as anyone who's ever seen rain knows. Eventually they grow large enough that gravity takes over. In the case of Venus, this would mean droplets harboring tiny life forms and falling toward the hotter, lower layers of the planet's atmosphere, where they'd inevitably dry up. "We propose for the first time that the only way life can survive indefinitely is with a life cycle that involves microbial life drying out as liquid droplets evaporate during settling, with the small desiccated 'spores' halting at, and partially populating, the Venus atmosphere stagnant lower haze layer," the paper's summary reads. These dried-out spores would go into a sort of hibernation phase similar to what tardigrades can do, and eventually be lifted higher into the atmosphere and rehydrated, continuing the life cycle.

This is all speculation. Fortunately for Venusian life hunters, a number of astronomers and their instruments are trained on the complex planet. NASA is even considering a mission, dubbed Veritas, that could depart as soon as 2026 to orbit and study Venus and its clouds.

Meanwhile, more data from Venus, and perhaps new discoveries, may soon be incoming. The forecast for the planet remains, as it has for some time, cloudy with a chance of microbes.

"Security researchers from Amsterdam have publicly detailed 'BlindSide' as a new speculative execution attack vector for both Intel and AMD processors," reports Phoronix: BlindSide is self-described as being able to "mount BROP-style attacks in the speculative execution domain to repeatedly probe and derandomize the kernel address space, craft arbitrary memory read gadgets, and enable reliable exploitation. This works even in face of strong randomization schemes, e.g., the recent FGKASLR or fine-grained schemes based on execute-only memory, and state-of-the-art mitigations against Spectre and other transient execution attacks."

From a single buffer overflow in the kernel, researchers claim three BlindSide exploits in being able to break KASLR (Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization), break arbitrary randomization schemes, and even break fine-grained randomization.
There's more information on the researcher's web site, and they've also created an informational video.

And here's a crucial excerpt from their paper shared by Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm: In addition to the Intel Whiskey Lake CPU in our evaluation, we confirmed similar results on Intel Xeon E3-1505M v5, XeonE3-1270 v6 and Core i9-9900K CPUs, based on the Skylake, KabyLake and Coffee Lake microarchitectures, respectively, as well as on AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 7 3700X CPUs, which are based on the Zen+ and Zen2 microarchitectures.

Overall, our results confirm speculative probing is effective on a modern Linux system on different microarchitectures, hardened with the latest mitigations.

[I]n a new study published in the journal Science, researchers have analyzed the chemical elements in thousands of foram samples and found that Earth is barreling toward a hothouse state not seen in 50 million years. Live Science reports: The new paper, which comprises decades of deep-ocean drilling missions into a single record, details Earth's climate swings across the entire Cenozoic era -- the 66 million-year period that began with the death of the dinosaurs and extends to the present epoch of human-induced climate change. The results show how Earth transitioned through four distinct climate states -- dubbed the Warmhouse, Hothouse, Coolhouse and Icehouse states -- in response to changes in the planet's orbit, greenhouse gas levels and the extent of polar ice sheets.

The zig-zagging chart (shown above) ends with a sobering peak. According to the researchers, the current pace of anthropogenic global warming far exceeds the natural climate fluctuations seen at any other point in the Cenozoic era, and has the potential to hyper-drive our planet out of a long icehouse phase into a searing hothouse state. "Now that we have succeeded in capturing the natural climate variability, we can see that the projected anthropogenic warming will be much greater than that," study co-author James Zachos, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections for 2300 in the 'business-as-usual' scenario will potentially bring global temperature to a level the planet has not seen in 50 million years." (The IPCC is a United Nations group that assesses the science, risks and impacts of climate change on the planet.)

An anonymous reader shares this enthusiastic report from ZDNet: Earlier this year, Linus Torvalds approved of adding drivers and other components in Rust to Linux.* Last week, at the virtual Linux Plumbers Conference, developers gave serious thought to using the Rust language for new Linux inline code. ["Nothing firm has been determined yet," reported Phoronix, "but it's a topic that is still being discussed."] And, now Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that its just-released Bottlerocket Linux for containers is largely written in Rust.

Mozilla may have cut back on Rust's funding, but with Linux embracing Rust, after almost 30-years of nothing but C, Rust's future is assured. Rust was chosen because it lends itself more easily to writing secure software. Samartha Chandrashekar, an AWS Product Manager, said it "helps ensure thread safety and prevent memory-related errors, such as buffer overflows that can lead to security vulnerabilities." Many other developers agree with Chandrashekar.

Bottlerocket also improved its security by using Device-mapper's verity target. This is a Linux kernel feature that provides integrity checking to help prevent attackers from overwriting core system software or other rootkit type attacks. It also includes the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), In Linux, eBPF is used for safe and efficient kernel function monitoring.
* Linus's exact words were "people are actively looking at, especially doing drivers and things that are not very central to the kernel itself, and having interfaces to do those, for example, in Rust. People have been looking at that for years now. I'm convinced it's going to happen one day."

The article also reminds readers that AWS's Bottlerocket "is also designed to be quick and easy to maintain... by including the bare essentials needed to run containers..."

"Besides its standard open-source elements, such as the Linux kernel and containerd container runtime, Bottlerocket's own code is licensed under your choice of either the Apache 2.0 or the MIT license."

Yahoo News reports: On Friday, Chadwick Boseman's family posted a final tweet on his Twitter account, announcing that he had died after a four-year battle with colon cancer. Twitter confirmed on Saturday afternoon that this tweet from Boseman's account is now the most-liked tweet on Twitter of all time...
"The 43-year-old's death shocked many in Hollywood who were unaware he had spent the last four years fighting colon cancer," notes the Los Angeles Times. But the tweet confirmed that the nine movies he'd filmed over the last four years — including four Marvel movies — "all were filmed during and between countless surgeries and chemotherapy."

That tweet has now risen to over 7.1 million likes — 65% more than the previous record-holder. Variety reports: Previously, the most-liked tweet on Twitter was from former President Barack Obama, who shared the Nelson Mandela quote, "No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion." The tweet was posted on Aug. 12, 2017, the same day as the deadly Charlottesville, Va., car attack at a protest against white supremacists. Obama's former record-holding tweet has 4.3 million likes and 1.6 million retweets.

After Boseman's death, Obama was one of the countless people to post a tribute to the actor, who played Jackie Robinson in the film 42. "Chadwick came to the White House to work with kids when he was playing Jackie Robinson," the former president wrote. "You could tell right away that he was blessed. To be young, gifted, and Black; to use that power to give them heroes to look up to; to do it all while in pain — what a use of his years."
CNET reports: Many on social media expressed both shock and admiration that the actor continued to produce films during his illness, and many were deeply touched by a video circulating widely Saturday in which Boseman speaks of Ian and Taylor, two children with terminal cancer he'd been in touch with during filming for Black Panther. The kids' parents, Boseman said in the video, relayed that Ian and Taylor were trying to hold on until the 2018 Marvel superhero film came out. We now know Boseman was waging his own cancer fight as he spoke of the children, making the footage all the more poignant.
Twitter has now restored its #BlackPanther emoji for fans organizing watch parties of the 2018 movie, reports Variety, and while some remembered his commencement address at Howard or his impact on other actors, others are sharing stories closer to home: "I keep thinking about my 3-year-old in his Black Panther costume," the writer Clint Smith tweeted. "How he wore it almost every day when he got it, refused to take it off. The way he walked around saying. 'I'm the Black Panther.' How happy it made him. What Chadwick gave us was immeasurable. What an enormous loss."

iPhone users will have to opt-in to tracking starting with iOS 14. Advertisers are "crying foul," reports the Washington Post: [W]ith Apple under the antitrust spotlight, its privacy move has also been called a power move by an advertising industry that is scrambling to adjust to the changes, expected to be included in iOS 14, the company's latest mobile operating system expected to go live next month... "This is not a change we want to make, but unfortunately Apple's updates to iOS14 have forced this decision," Facebook said in a blog post.

Some in the advertising industry see the moves as part privacy, part self-interest on the part of Apple. Apple also offers advertising, and by limiting the amount of data outside marketers collect, Apple's access to the data becomes more valuable. "I think there's probably 30 percent truth in that they're doing it for privacy reasons and it's 70 percent that they're doing it because it's what's good for Apple," said Nick Jordan, founder of Narrative I/O, which helps companies gather data for advertising. "It's a question for regulators and courts whether they should be able to wield the power they do over this ecosystem," he said. "They created it, but can they rule it with an iron fist...?"

Apple says that when customers open apps, they'll be asked whether they'd like to give that specific app permission to track them with something called an "ID for Advertisers," or IDFA. Apple created the IDFA in 2012 to help app developers earn money on iOS. The unique number, assigned to iPhone customers, allows advertisers to track their movements around websites and apps by following that unique identifier... With the new pop-up messages, customers will be forced to make a choice. It is likely that most consumers will opt out of being tracked. Facebook said in a blog post that it would render its off-platform ad network so ineffective that it may not make sense to offer it to developers at all. Facebook said that in testing it had seen a more than 50% drop in revenue as a result of the loss of data from Apple...

"There's been no discussion, no commercial transaction. They're saying this is what we decided is right in the name of privacy and this is what we're going to do," said Stuart Ingis, a partner at the law firm Venable who represents the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media, an association of advertisers.
"Personally, I don't see the problem here," argues Slashdot reader JustAnotherOldGuy.

The Post notes that Apple runs its own advertising business based on data gathered from its users — but Apple's director of privacy engineering "doesn't consider this data gathering 'tracking'...because Apple collects the data from its own users on its own apps and other services. Facebook and other advertisers, Apple says, gather data on users even when they're not using Facebook."

Phoronix reports: As mentioned back in July, upstream Linux developers have been working to figure out a path for adding Rust code to the Linux kernel. That topic is now being further explored at this week's virtual Linux Plumbers Conference...

To be clear though, these Rust Linux kernel plans do not involve rewriting large parts of the kernel in Rust (at least for the foreseeable future...), there would be caveats on the extent to which Rust code could be used and what functionality, and the Rust support would be optional when building the Linux kernel. C would remain the dominant language of the kernel and then it's just a matter of what new functionality gets added around Rust if concerned by memory safety, concurrency, and other areas where Rust is popular with developers. Various upstream developers have been interested in Rust for those language benefits around memory safety and security as well as its syntax being close to C. There would be a to-be-determined subset of Rust to be supported by the Linux kernel.... While the Rust code would be optional, the developers do acknowledge there are limitations on where Rust is supported due to the LLVM compiler back-ends. But at least for x86/x86_64, ARM/ARM64, POWER, and other prominent targets there is support along with the likes of RISC-V.

Nothing firm has been determined yet but it's a topic that is still being discussed at the virtual LPC this week and surely over the weeks/months ahead on the kernel mailing list. There is Rust-For-Linux on GitHub with a prototype kernel module implementation. There is also the PDF slides from Thursday's talk on the matter.
It's not clear to me that this is a done deal. But the article argues that "it's still looking like it will happen, it's just a matter of when the initial infrastructure will be in place and how slowly the rollout will be..."

A review at the Android Police site calls Pine64's new Linux-based PinePhone "the most interesting smartphone I've tried in years," with 17 different operating systems available (including Fedora, Ubuntu Touch, SailfishOS, openSUSE, and Arch Linux ARM): There's a replaceable battery, which is compatible with batteries designed for older Samsung Galaxy J7 phones. It's good to know that even if PinePhone vanished overnight, you could still purchase new batteries for around $10-15...

There's a microSD card slot above the SIM tray, which supports cards up to 2TB in size. While it can be used as extra storage, just like the SD slots in Android phones and tablets, it can also function as a bootable drive. If you write an operating system image to the SD card and put it in the PinePhone, the phone will boot from the SD card. This means you can move between operating systems on the PinePhone by simply swapping microSD cards, which is amazing for trying out new Linux distributions without wiping data. How great would it be if Android phones could do that?

Finally, the inside of the PinePhone has six hardware killswitches that can be manipulated with a screwdriver. You can use them to turn off the modem, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, microphone, rear camera, front camera, and headphone jack. No need to put a sticker over the selfie camera if you're worried about malicious software — just flip the switch and never worry about it again.... For a $150 phone produced in limited batches by a company with no previous experience in the smartphone industry, I'm impressed it's built as well as it is...

I look forward to seeing what the community around the PinePhone can accomplish.
A Pine64 blog post this weekend touts "a boat-load of cool and innovative things" being attempted by the PinePhone community, including users working on things like a fingerprint scanner or a thermal camera, plus a community that's 3D-printing their own custom PinePhone cases. And Pine64 has now identified three candidates for a future keyboard option (each of which can be configured as either a slide-out or clamshell keyboard): I feel like we have finally gotten into a good production rhythm; it was only last month we announced the postmarketOS Community Edition of the PinePhone, and this month I am here to tell you that the factory will deliver the phones to us at the end of this month... I don't know about you, but I think that this is a rather good production pace. At the time of writing, and based on current sale rates, the postmarketOS production-run will sell out in a matter of days...

While I have no further announcements at this time, what I will say is that we have no intention of slowing down the pace now until February 2021 (when Chinese New Year begins)...

Satellite-mapping technology "that detects stains on the ice from penguin droppings" has revealed there are more Emperor colonies than previously known in fast-warming Antarctica, reports Bloomberg: Eleven new colonies of the species were found, taking the census to 61 across the polar continent, according to a study by scientists at the British Antarctic Survey published Wednesday. The scientists used images from Europe's Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission to locate the flightless birds.

"This is an exciting discovery," said lead author and geographer Peter Fretwell in a statement. "Whilst this is good news, the colonies are small and so only take the overall population count up by 5-10%, to just over half a million penguins..."

The discovery will be used by scientists who are monitoring the birds and raising concerns because they're particularly vulnerable to sea ice melting from climate change... Scientists warned that most of the newly found colonies are in locations likely to be lost as the climate warms and large sections of seasonal ice -- where penguins mate -- risk disappearing. "Birds in these sites are therefore probably the 'canaries in the coal mine'," said Phil Trathan, head of conservation biology at BAS.

"Johnson & Johnson's experimental coronavirus vaccine protected macaque monkeys with a single shot in a pre-clinical study, potentially gaining on other vaccines that are further along in testing but require two doses over time," reports Bloomberg: Five of six primates exposed to the pandemic-causing pathogen were immune after a single injection. The exception showed low levels of the virus, according to a study published in the medical journal Nature...

The health-care behemoth kick-started human trials on July 22 in Belgium and in the U.S. earlier this week. Although other vaccine-makers have moved more quickly into development, with AstraZeneca having already administered its experimental vaccine to almost 10,000 people in the U.K., gaining protection with a single dose could prove an advantage in the logistical challenge of rolling out massive vaccination programs worldwide.... The primate data show that the coronavirus vaccine candidate generated a strong antibody response, and provided protection with only a single dose, said Paul Stoffels, the drugmaker's chief scientific officer.

J&J aims to embark on the last phase of tests in September, compressing the traditional timeline as it races against others including AstraZeneca, Moderna Inc., Pfizer Inc. and GlaxoSmithKline Plc for a shot to end the pandemic.... The New Brunswick, New Jersey-based drugmaker will test both a one-dose coronavirus shot, and a shot coupled with a booster in its early-stage studies of more than 1,000 adults, which launched this month.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A massive leak of apparent Nintendo source code is giving gamers a rare, unauthorized look at Nintendo's development process dating back to the Super NES era. The massive trove of files, first posted to 4chan Friday and quickly dubbed the "Gigaleak" by the community, includes compilable code and assets for Super NES, Game Boy, and N64 games in the Mario, Mario Kart, Zelda, F-Zero, and Pokemon series. Hidden among that code is a bevy of pre-release art and sound files that have never seen the light of day, as well as fully playable prototype versions of some games. Modders and homebrew developers have been digging through the trove of data over the weekend and taking to Twitter and YouTube with their discoveries. Among the most interesting findings:

- A version of Super Mario 64 including data for a 3D model of Luigi (likely for the scrapped two-player mode). Players have inserted that model into the ROM to create video of Luigi running around. The leak also includes few unused test rooms for the game.
- A Yoshi's Island prototype featuring differences in the map screen, interface, music (and including the prefix "Super Mario Bros. 5" in Japanese). The prototype also features two apparently unused mini-games (No. 1, No. 2) and some unused test levels.
- Pokemon prototypes featuring early and unused sprite designs for many monsters.
- An original prototype named "Super Donkey" featuring a Rayman-style character in a Yoshi's Island-styled world [Update: A previous version of this post mischaracterized the music in this video. Ars regrets the error].
- Sprite data for Luigi giving an apparent middle finger and Bowser outside of his clown-copter in Super Mario World. The code also contains multiple early designs for Yoshi (some of which match art previously revealed in interviews with Nintendo developers) and a completely new map screen design (which also matches previously revealed screenshots).
- A version of Star Fox 2 with previously unseen characters.
- High-quality voice samples from Star Fox 64, F-Zero X and Super Mario 64 before they were compressed to fit on relatively small N64 cartridges.
- Graphics for a Pilotwings prototype called Dragonfly, previously seen only in grainy magazine screenshots.

The western bumblebee is one of around 30 bumblebee species in the western U.S. and Canada. Now a federal review "unveils an alarming trend for the western bumblebee population, which has seen its numbers dwindle by as much as 93% in the last two decades," reports the Associated Press: The find by the U.S. Geological Survey will help inform a species status assessment to begin this fall by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which may ultimately add the insect to its endangered species list. Tabitha Graves, senior author of the study and a research ecologist with the survey, said the trend with the western bumblebee documented between 1998 and 2018 is troubling because of their important role as pollinators...

There are multiple factors at play that are contributing to the demise of the bumblebee, including pesticides, habitat fragmentation, a warming climate and pathogens, researchers say... "This bumblebee that was once very widespread and common is something that people started to see less frequently," said Diana Cox-Foster, research leader and location coordinator at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Pollinating Insects Research Unit at Utah State University. "There are localized populations where it is still happy and healthy, but there have been declines in large parts of its previous distributions. ... Asking why these declines are happening is very important."

"The risk of nasty side effects in the Moderna and Oxford trials should be made clear now, before it ends up as fodder for the skeptics," argues Hilda Bastian, a former consumer health care advocate and a Ph.D. student at Bond University who studies evidence-based medicine. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from her article via Wired: On Monday, vaccine researchers from Oxford University and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca announced results from a "Phase 1/2 trial," suggesting their product might be able to generate immunity without causing serious harm. Similar, but smaller-scale results, were posted just last week for another candidate vaccine produced by the biotech firm Moderna, in collaboration with the U.S. National Institutes of Health. [...] Back in May, a CNN report described the Oxford group as being "the most aggressive in painting the rosiest picture" of its product, so let's start with them. Just how rosy is the Oxford picture really? It's certainly true that this week's news shows the vaccine has the potential to provide protection from Covid-19. But there are flies in the ointment. After the first clinical trial for this vaccine began in April, for example, the researchers added new study arms in which people got acetaminophen every six hours for 24 hours after the injection. That's not featured in their marketing, of course, and I saw no discussion of this unusual step in media coverage in early summer. Newspapers only said the vaccine had been proven "safe with rhesus monkeys," and did not cause any adverse effects in those animal tests. It was a worrying signal though: How rough a ride were people having with this vaccine? Was the acetaminophen meant to keep down fever, headaches, malaise -- or all of the above?

The press release for Monday's publication of results from the Oxford vaccine trials described an increased frequency of "minor side effects" among participants. A look at the actual paper, though, reveals this to be a marketing spin that has since been parroted in media reports. Yes, mild reactions were far more common than worse ones. But moderate or severe harms -- defined as being bad enough to interfere with daily life or needing medical care -- were common, too. Around one-third of people vaccinated with the Covid-19 vaccine without acetaminophen experienced moderate or severe chills, fatigue, headache, malaise, and/or feverishness. Close to 10 percent had a fever of at least 100.4 degrees and just over one-fourth developed moderate or severe muscle aches. That's a lot, in a young and healthy group of people -- and the acetaminophen didn't help much for most of those problems. The paper's authors designated the vaccine as "acceptable" and "tolerated," but we don't yet know how acceptable this will be to most people.

There is another red flag. Clinical trials for other Covid-19 vaccines have placebo groups, where participants receive saline injections. Only one of the Oxford vaccine trials is taking this approach, however; the others instead compare the experimental treatment to an injected meningococcal vaccine. There can be good reasons to do this: Non-placebo injections may mimic telltale signs that you've received an active vaccine, such as a skin reaction, making the trial more truly "blind." But their use also opens the door to doubt-sowing claims that any harms of the new vaccine are getting buried among the harms already caused by the control-group, "old" vaccines.What about the Moderna vaccine? "According to the press release from May, there were no serious adverse events for the people in that particular dosage group," reports Wired. "But last week's paper shows the full results: By the time they'd had two doses, every single one was showing signs of headaches, chills or fatigue; and for at least 80 percent this could have been enough to interfere with their normal activities. A participant who had a severe reaction to a particularly high dose has talked in detail about how bad it was: If reactions even half as bad as this were to be common for some of these vaccines, they will be hard sells once they reach the community -- and there could be a lot of people who are reluctant to get the second injection."

UPDATE 7/27/20: Slashdot interviewed Oxford Vaccine Trial participant Jennifer Riggins and asked what her reaction was to Wired's article. Riggins is an American technology journalist and marketer who's self-employed in London. Here's what she said:

"I think the article is a poorly written, poorly researched opinion piece. It says offering acetaminophen or paracetamol is unusual with vaccines. I'm a working mom with a three-year-old, and you are told to give them acetaminophen or paracetamol before all live vaccines as they can cause discomfort and fever for the first 24 to 48 hours.

"I'm actually surprised this article was in Wired that tends to be reputable. It seems to be written by a vaccine skeptic at best who knows little about them. This is a dangerous message because we most likely won't have a widely distributed vaccine til 2021 at earliest. Even longer if you consider, like the chicken pox vaccine, it needs a booster for efficacy. This flu season is going to be awful and then combined with this coronavirus. Add to that less kids are getting vaccinated or at least are delayed during the pandemic. Any antivaxxer message is incredibly dangerous. We won't be able to have herd immunity for Covid-19 by winter but we could for the flu which will save so many lives."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechnica: Scientists at the KIT Energy Center at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology say there is enough lithium dissolved in the groundwater extracted by German geothermal heating and electricity installations to meet the needs of most if not all of the battery manufacturers in the country. "As far as we know, there can be up to 200 milligrams per liter," says geoscientist Dr. Jens Grimmer of the Institute of Applied Geosciences at KIT. "If we consistently use this potential, we could cover a considerable part of the demand in Germany." Dr. Florencia Saravia from the research unit of the German Technical and Scientific Association for Gas and Water (DVGW) adds: "We export many environmental problems to third countries in order to maintain and improve our living standards. With this process, we can assume our responsibility and extract important raw materials for modern technologies in an environmentally friendly way right on our own doorstep. We can also build up regional value chains, create jobs, and reduce geopolitical dependencies at the same time."

Until now, there was no cost effective way to extract lithium from the groundwater geothermal facilities process to make heat or electricity. The Grimmer/Saravia process hopes to change that. "In a first step, the lithium ions are filtered out of the thermal water and in a second step, they are further concentrated until lithium can be precipitated as a salt," says Grimmer. The lithium precipitate is produced in only a few hours. KIT has applied for a patent based on the work of the two scientists. A pilot "proof of concept" program is taking place at one geothermal facility. If it proves successful, a larger commercial scale installation will follow. There are other commercial applications involved. The Grimmer/Saravia process can also capture other valuable elements such as rubidium or cesium from the thermal water, increasing the commercial importance of the discovery.