Ancient virus DNA thrives in us

Traces of ancient viruses which infected our ancestors millions of years ago are more widespread in us than previously thought.

A study shows how extensively viruses from as far back as the dinosaur era still thrive in our genetic material.

It sheds light on the origins of a big proportion of our genetic material, much of which is still not understood.

The scientists investigated the genomes of 38 mammals including humans, mice, rats, elephants and dolphins.

The research was carried out at Oxford University, the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Centre in New York and the Rega Institute in Belgium.

It is reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One of the viruses was found to have invaded the genome of a common ancestor around 100 million years ago with its remnants discovered in almost every mammal in the study.

Another infected an early primate with the result that it was found in apes, humans and other primates as well.

The work established that many of these viruses lost the ability to transfer from one cell to another.

Instead they evolved to stay within their host cell where they have profilerated very effectively – spending their entire life cycle within the cell.

Forced choice

The researchers found evidence of the viruses multiplying so extensively within mammals’ genomes that they have been compared to an outbreak of disease.

The senior author of the study, Dr Robert Belshaw from Oxford University’s Zoology Department, said: “This is the story of an epidemic within every animal’s genome, a story which has been going on for 100 million years and which continues today.

“We suspect that these viruses are forced to make a choice: either to keep their ‘viral’ essence and spread between animals and species. Or to commit to one genome and then spread massively within it.”

The study shows that the viruses involved have lost a gene called Env, which is responsible for transmission between cells.

Known as endogenous retroviruses, these micro-organisms have gone on to become 30 times more abundant in their host cells.

The study is one of many attempting to understand the full complexity of the human genome.

Astonishingly, only 1.5% of the genetic material in our cells codes for human life. Half of the rest is sometimes described as “junk DNA” with no known function, and the other half consist of genes introduced by viruses and other parasites.

According to the lead author, Dr Gkikas Magiorkinis, “much of the dark matter in our genome plays by its own rules, in the same way as an epidemic of an infectious disease but operating over millions of years.

“Learning the rules of this ancient game will help us understand their role in health and disease.”

This raises the extraordinary scenario of our DNA serving as an environment in which viruses can evolve – a micro-ecology within the double-helix of our genetic material.

There is evidence that they can provide positive services. For example the protein syncytin – derived from a virus – helps develop the placenta.

Dr Belshaw says that endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) are not known to have any obvious or direct health effects.

“But there could be effects we’re not picking up on or things we could even take advantage of if we detect ERVs moving around or expressing proteins as a result of cancer or infection.”

The study was supported by the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society.

via BBC News – Ancient virus DNA thrives in us.

Naked men started flat fire in Wiccan ritual to get rid of negative vibes

Two naked men started fires in a flat as part of a pagan ritual to get rid of “negative vibes”, a court heard.

Aftab Mughal went to see Terence Williams for advice and the pair decided to burn away the negativity using lit newspaper as part of a Wiccan ceremony.

Neighbours saw smoke pouring from the property and dialled 999 after seeing the naked men inside the apartment.

The pair were forcibly removed from the flat by firefighters still refusing to cover themselves up when they were given blankets outside.

But rather than drive away the bad vibes the two men found themselves arrested and charged with arson.

Nottingham Crown Court was told how a neighbour became concerned after seeing thick smoke coming from the flat in October last year.

He climbed on a pitched roof at the front of the house and, when he looked inside, could see Williams standing next to a fire completely naked and throwing things on to it, the court was told.

He banged on the window to get Williams’ attention and shouted at him to get out.

Siward James-Moore, prosecuting, said: “The flames were licking around Mr Williams’ ankles at that stage. He was staring right through him.”

The man then forced his way through the door to rescue Williams, not realising Mughal was also inside and involved in the ritual.

The court heard the pair had been burning white sage leaves and a candle as they meditated.

But when Mughal said there was a “negative vibe in the air”, they decided to burn it away.

“Terence Williams suggested both their clothes should be burnt to enhance the ritual they were undertaking,” said Mr James-Moore.

Firefighters entered Williams’ home in The Meadows, Nottingham, as part of a pagan ritual to get rid of “negative vibes”. They found the two men both completely naked.

“They initially refused to leave, were not concerned for their own safety and were shocked the fire service was called.

“They were both asked to leave but both ran upstairs to get away from them.”

The men were found upstairs and were “removed” naked by firefighters and taken outside “in that condition”, the court heard.

A police officer who arrived saw Williams and Mughal standing outside, still naked, making no attempt to cover themselves. He gave them blankets but they threw them on the ground.

Mr James-Moore said: “Aftab Mughal, as far as he was concerned, he didn’t think the ritual was one that made him fear for his safety and he was bemused when the fire brigade arrived.”

Williams, 51, described the ceremony as a Wiccan ceremony, involving burning items to cleanse their souls. Wicca is a modern religion based on ancient pagan traditions.

“He said he walked around the property with Aftab Mughal with small pieces of paper,” explained Mr James Moore.

“He believed he had control of the situation and burned paper and a wooden broom.”

The court heard there had been three different fires in the flat. There were two gas cannisters in a cupboard, which were potentially a threat had the fire got out of control.

Both men pleaded guilty to arson and the judge, Recorder Jason MacAdam, told them “this fire was caused through stupidity rather than malice.”

He gave each man, who had been of previous good character, a 12-month community order, with 120 hours of unpaid work to do in the community. …

via Naked men started flat fire in Wiccan ritual to get rid of negative vibes – Telegraph.

 

Woman arrested after shop dummy entered as Aberdeen council election candidate

A woman has been arrested after a shop dummy was entered as a candidate for the council elections in Aberdeen.

The mannequin – which is understood to have been seized by police – originally appeared on the list of potential councillors for the Hazlehead, Ashley and Queens Cross ward.

Grampian Police said a woman, 63, has been charged under the Representation of the People Act.

The dummy was entered under the name Helena Torry.

via BBC News – Woman arrested after shop dummy entered as Aberdeen council election candidate.

Email accident leads an entire company to think it’s being fired (1,300 people)

We’ve all made the occasional snafu with our email accounts from time to time. But while including the wrong person on an email can be embarrassing for the sender and surprising to the recipient, it’s seldom as surprising as this: Financial firm Aviva Investors accidentally fired its entire staff by email.

The form-letter style email spelled out the requirements of the employees’ confidentiality agreement, and included the line “I would like to take this opportunity to thank you and wish you all the best for the future.” Of course, the email was meant for one specific person who was leaving the company, but an awkward computer mistake led to the message being sent to everyone in the company.

The electronic communique didn’t specifically tell workers that they were fired, and after about a half hour, a second email went out apologizing for the mistake and clarifying that no one was fired. Still, for a lot of employees, those had to be a nerve-wracking couple of minutes considering that the U.K.-based Aviva announced earlier this year that it would be eliminating 160 positions — about 12% of its total workforce.

This is not the first time a problem with technology has led to someone being fired. In March, a Japanese man successfully sued Google after he was fired due to various criminal acts appearing next to his name via the search’s auto-complete feature. And later that same month, a school teacher was fired for failing to hand over her Facebook password after the school district was unable to view the contents of her personal account.

[Reuters via TheNextWeb]

via Email accident leads an entire company to think it’s being fired | Technology News Blog – Yahoo! News.

Woman’s Torso Sent To BJ’s Wholesale Headquarters Accidentally

Part of a dead woman’s body was mistakenly sent to the BJ’s Wholesale headquarters in Westborough, Mass. on Friday — all because of an itty bitty shipping error, WBZ NewsRadio reported.

The torso was headed for a research lab in Florida, but a misprinted label sent it to horrified employees at the home office of the members-only wholesale giant.

“They started opening the package and they saw the description of what they were opening, that it was a torso of a female,” Westborough police Sgt. Jonathan Kalagher told the station. “They never saw the torso. They saw there was packaging and some type of gel. They immediately notified their supervisor.”

The body wasn’t damaged in the flop because it was marked “perishable,” and was handled properly, the Milford Daily News reported.

The company then made arrangements to have the box shipped to the rightful lab.

via Woman’s Torso Sent To BJ’s Wholesale Headquarters Accidentally.

FBI Shutting down the Internet in July? Yes, sort of.

There’s a story circulating that if you don’t ensure your computer is malware-free by July 9, 2012, the FBI will shut off your access to the Internet. Like most such alarmist claims, it’s only partly true, though if you’re a Windows or Mac user, you’ll want to pay attention.

The original story dates back to 2007, when a group of cyber-ne’er-do-wells launched malware dubbed “DNSChanger,” infecting millions of computers in hundreds of countries with code that allowed them to manipulate the way Internet ads appear in browsers, ultimately racking up millions in illicit fees.

How did the malware work? DNSChanger targets Windows or Mac systems (Linux, iOS and Android users are in the clear) by manipulating Domain Name Servers (DNS), which translate syntax-based URLs into IP addresses. When you type something like “www.yahoo.com” into your browser, for instance, your request hits your Internet service provider’s DNS server, which translates it into a numeric IP address. If you plug that IP address into your browser’s URL bar in lieu of the web address, barring any IP tricks, you’ll land on the exact same web page. The Internet’s underlying architecture is based on TCP/IP, in other words, not the more easily remembered words we type into our browsers.

6 hours ago

6 hours ago

DNSChanger fiddles with that DNS routing: Once a computer was infected, the malware redirected DNS-related requests to servers controlled by the fraud ring, which then piped web ads to users, ultimately putting millions of dollars in the cybercriminals’ pockets.

Working with Estonian officials, the FBI was able to track down the perps — six Estonian nationals were arrested for the crime last November — and seize their servers. But given the number of computers estimated infected, the FBI opted to leave the servers running, ad-neutralized, to avoid disrupting Internet functionality for those unaware their computers were compromised. And to give users more time to purge, the FBI secured a court order on March 12, 2012 that authorized the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) — a nonprofit corporation that supports the Internet’s infrastructure — to roll out and maintain temporary “clean” DNS servers. But since these servers cost money to operate, the plan has been to shut them off on July 9, 2012. When that happens, DNS-related Internet activity on infected computers, e.g. web and email, will cease to function.

To be clear, your Internet service itself will be unaffected by the change: If your computer is infected with the DNSChanger malware, your Internet router will keep routing and any commands sent by your computer that aren’t DNS-related will still pass. The FBI isn’t shutting off Internet service to impacted machines, it’s just pulling the plug on a stopgap measure designed to bandaid the broken process currently facilitating DNS communication on infected machines.

How do you tell if you’re infected? Simple: The FBI runs a DNS checker page, where you can type your DNS info into a box to check its validity. Easier still, you can click on a link that’ll automatically check and return either a green or red background, indicating “clean” or “infected” states, respectively. Alternately, the DNS Changer Working Group (DCWG), created to help remedy the malware, maintains a page with detailed information on the malware, how to detect it and how to remove it, including a table of links to popular antivirus company remedies.

via DNSChanger: FBI Warns Infected Computers Will Lose Web, Email Access in July | Techland | TIME.com.

From FBI.gov:

You can also test to see if you are affected by visiting the following DNSChanger Check-Up sites below. If this Check-Up site indicates that you are affected by DNSChanger, then visit http://www.dcwg.org/cleanup.html for information on how to address this problem.

URL	Language	Maintainer
http://www.dns-ok.us/	English	DNS Changer Working Group (DCWG)
http://www.dns-ok.de/	German	Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI)
http://www.dns-ok.fi/	Finish	CERT-Fi
http://www.dns-ok.ax/	Swedish	CERT-Fi
http://www.dns-ok.be/	Dutch/French	CERT.be
http://www.dns-ok.fr/	French	CERT-LEXSI
http://www.dns-ok.ca/	English/French	CIRA and CCIRC
http://www.dns-ok.lu/	English	CIRCL
http://dns-ok.nl/	Dutch/English	SIDN

Doors Unlock With Keyed Vibrations Sent From Your Smartphone Through Your Bones

Doors Unlock With Keyed Vibrations Sent From Your Smartphone Through Your Bones

It gives the term skeleton key a whole new meaning: a prototype system from AT&T Labs that beams a unique vibration through a user’s bones to be picked up by a receiver in a door handle, automaticallyunlocking the door at the touch of the handle. Using piezoelectric transducers, the system could someday be embedded in smartphones or wristwatches to create doors that automatically unlock when the right person touches them and stay firmly dead-bolted when anyone else tries to gain entry.

In the future, in other words, you are your own set of keys. According to InnovationNewsDaily, the system works via frequencies that humans can’t feel but could hear in a very quiet room. These acoustic signals travel from one piezoelectric transducer through human bones much the way sound waves vibrate through the skull and inner ear to enable our sense of hearing. The vibration travels straight through the body including through the hand, which can impart the signal to anything it touches. Put another piezoelectric transducer in the door handle, and the door can identify the person touching the handle and grant entry appropriately.

But it’s not just the raw acoustic signal that the door is analyzing. The brains behind this prototype key have found that different skeletons–different bone densities and lengths, etc.–degrade the acoustic signals in different ways. That means that in future iterations of their system, only the right combination of signal and skeleton would open the door. In other words, someone couldn’t just steal your phone and use it to open your car door or your apartment–without your unique skeletal fingerprint added to the signal, the door would remain closed. And it might text or email you to let you know someone tried to gain entry without the right key.

All that is pretty neat, especially considering that the applications for this wouldn’t have to stop at door locks. Other individual-specific implements could be rigged to recognize different people, so a car shared by a family could automatically adjust the driver’s seat and mirrors when a new person stepped into the car, or a computer could switch to the right parental settings depending on whether Dad or Junior is touching the keyboard. More about this over atInnovationNewsDaily.

http://pulse.me/s/8vJ06

Ukrainian Living Doll, Valeria Lukyanova, Uses Plastic Surgery And Cosmetics To Become Barbie

Ukrainian model Valeria Lukyanova is a living doll. The 21-year-old has used plastic surgery as well as everyday cosmetics to transform herself into a real-life

Barbie.

Valeria Lukyanova describes herself as “the most famous Russian woman on the Russian-language Internet.” She has posted a multitude of online content, from photos to YouTube videos to outlandish quips on her personal website. Her YouTube channel, Amatue, has over 1.5 million video views.

Lukyanova has big, glassy eyes, long blonde hair, an ample bosom and a tiny carved waist. Her Facebook page features tens of photos of her astonishing Barbie-like body and face. In her YouTube videos, she reveals that she uses opaque lenses to achieve that glassy, wide-eyed look of a doll. She also shows off some interesting makeup styles that echo Barbie, like porcelain skin and glossy bow lips.

Her living-doll looks have brought her Internet fame but some are shocked by her physical appearance.

via Ukrainian Living Doll, Valeria Lukyanova, Uses Plastic Surgery And Cosmetics To Become Barbie [PHOTOS] – International Business Times.

What exactly is ‘Hand Shredded A$$ Meat’? A new dictionary for Chinese restaurants may tell you

Overseas tourists often find the menus here befuddling, for good reason.

After all, what Westerner has experience with foods like these? “Cowboy leg,” “Hand-shredded ass meat,” “Red-burned lion head,” “Strange flavor noodles,” “Blow-up flatfish with no result,” or “Tofu made by woman with freckles.”

As proud as the Chinese people are of their thousands of years of gastronomic culture, even a Chinese native can feel disoriented when going to another province, given all the different styles of cooking. Many of the food names, often unique to different provinces, get lost in translation, especially in booming cities starting to embrace overseas tourists.

With few English speakers, restaurants usually translate their menus word by word directly from an English-Chinese dictionary. Or they just Google the Chinese characters. A photo that made the rounds online a few years ago got a chuckle from a lot of people: a restaurant with a large “page not found” sign above its door as its English name.

But the Beijing Municipal government hopes to end such unintended jokes with its new guidebook intended for the public and restaurants alike, “Enjoy Culinary Delights: The English Translation of Chinese Menus.”

The effort began in 2006 with a “Beijing speaks English” campaign. By the 2008 Summer Olympics, officials had created a draft guide with translations for major restaurants to meet the demand for arriving athletes and tourists.

“After 2008, we felt like the book was in a good demand, so we kept working on it and collected more menus. Finally we translated over 2,000 Chinese dish names,” said Xiang Ping, deputy chief of the “Beijing speaks English” committee, in an interview with NBC News. …

… So next time you’re in Beijing and you are confronted with a menu item like “hand shredded ass meat,” hopefully you can crack open the book to get some guidance. It means “hand shredded donkey meat.”

via Behind The Wall – What exactly is ‘Hand Shredded A$$ Meat’? A new dictionary for Chinese restaurants may tell you.

Russian Caviar Eating Contest

Moscow’s too fancy for hot dogs. Instead, this contest features men in suits going to town on $70,000 of fish eggs.

Men eat caviar during a competition which requires participants to eat half-kilogram of caviar in the fastest time in Moscow on April 20, 2012.

via Russian Caviar Eating Contest.