Health

New worm a real bear

PC users of the world beware! A new worm called BugBear is making the rounds, and New Scientist says it reflects a worrying new trend in virus code. Instead of disabling your computer, or turning it into a denial of service pod to flood other machines with garbage, BugBear contains a Trojan horse program that can collect credit card details, passwords and other private information stored from a computer and send it to a hacker. “When run, the Trojan disables anti-virus programs running on your machine,” New Scientists says. “It then installs a ‘keyboard sniffing’ program that remains in the background and copies every keystroke on your keyboard and saves them to a file. At some point later it opens a network connection and transmits the file to its creator, or bundles it up and sends it out as an email.” One side effect of the worm is that it tries to mail itself to any other machines on your network, including printers. So if you see unexpected, long junk printouts spewing for the LaserJet, you ought to get checked for infection.

See also:
>>BugBear at Sophos

Teeth Grinder’s Lament ? ‘E’ May Wound Brain

Results of an animal study published in the journal Science raise the possibility that the use of the rave fave drug Ecstasy ? methylene-dioxymethamphetamine ? can damage brain cells. The same cells, in fact, that are destroyed by Parkinson?s disease.
“We don’t know if human beings develop the same effects we describe in monkeys and in baboons,” Dr. George Ricaurte, a Johns Hopkins neurologist, told Reuters. “The broader issue is, are there hundreds of cases of unexplained parkinsonism in MDMA users? We don’t know because we haven’t looked.”
The Reuters article also contains the following quotation, reproduced below only marginally out of context: “[A]s you might imagine, it is not easy to get a baboon to take an oral dose of a drug.”

Wascally Waksal

Though not strictly a science story, the Wall Street Journal has a devastating profile this morning of Sam Waksal, founder of ImClone. It’s a warning not only for directors of technology-based companies, but for investors and the media, who can be charmed by one person with a winning personality and a compelling story (in this case a promising cancer-fighting molecule). Terrific digging by reporter Geeta Anand reveals a string of research jobs from which Waksal was ousted for misleading and sometimes falsified results. Do yourself a favor and read this one through to the end. Suddenly Martha Stewart’s alleged insider trading of ImClone stock seems like the least of anyone’s worries about Waksal.

From the mouthes of Babe

This weekend I sank my teeth into some delicious beef ribs. But researchers at the Forsyth Institute say they’ve done one better ? they’ve sunk pork teeth into rat guts. The experiment involved taking seeded cells from immature teeth of six-month-old pigs and placing them in the intestines of rats (who no doubt were thrilled at the addition). Within 30 weeks, small tooth crowns made of enamel and dentin had formed. Within five years, the Forsythe team says, they hope to be able to harvest teeth of specific size and shape, and five years after that to regrow human teeth.

Senator seeks terrorist-virus probe

Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy has urged the government to explore a possibile terrorist link to an outbreak of West Nile virus that has killed 54 people this year. “I think we have to ask ourselves: Is it coincidence that we’re seeing such an increase in West Nile virus or is that something that’s being tested as a biological weapon against us?” said Leahy, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee. Leahy’s office was one of several to receive anthrax-laden envelopes last year, the Associated Press reports. Leahy said he could point to no specific evidence that the outbreak of the mosquito-borne virus was linked to terrorism, and a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there is no evidence to suggest an act of bioterrorism. Nearly 1,300 people in the U.S. have so far contracted West Nile. “In the times in which we live, questions about our vulnerabilities are unavoidable,” the Vermont senator said in a written statement. “Finding all the answers we can is more important than ever.”

Preparing for smallpox

Guidelines for inoculating the entire U.S. population against smallpox are being distributed to states today by federal health officials. At the moment mass vaccination is likely only if the deadly virus returns through an act of bio-terrorism. In the event of an outbreak, states would have to vaccinate their populations within days. (A person exposed to the virus can only be successfully immunized within five days of exposure.) The plan from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows states how to handle this massive effort, down to details like the number of hours a clinic would need to stay open (16), what to stress in public announcements (“urgency and patience, not panic”), the number of large-screens TVs needed per clinic (5, for video orientation), the temperature at which each brand of vaccine must be stored (varies), and the number of security personnel needed per 8-hour shift at a clinic (20). Smallpox is deadly, with a mortality rate of at least 30 percent. Because the disease was eradicated globally in the 1970s, most people have little immunity to it — and health workers aren’t familiar with it. Those facts plus the mobility of our plane-hopping poplulation mean that without extensive planning an outbreak could overwhelm public health systems.

Afghan seedbank destroyed

As if Afghanistan didn’t have enough woes, the country has just lost its main agricultural insurance policy: two stores of carefully selected and maintained seeds representing the biodiversity of the nation’s native crops. The seeds were ruined when looters broke into a storage facility where they were kept and made off with the airtight jars that held them. The seeds themselves were tossed on the ground, and have now been so jumbled together that they are virtually worthless. “It’s like having a library of books with no titles on them,” says Geoffrey Hawtin, director general of the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute in Rome. “All of the [traits you prize] are there, but you no longer know where to look for them.”

Baby got back

Scientists have pinpointed a mutation that gives sheep big butts — big, hard, glorious butts. A callipyge sheep has a bottom made of muscle, not fat, due to a changed DNA letter. The Duke University geneticist who discovered the mutation, Randy Jirtle, said that some humans might share the trait: “They’d have relatively large rear ends, and absolutely no fat — like sprinters.” Just like Solid Gold, the first sheep with the trait, born two decades ago. His descendants are called “callipyge” from the Greek for “beautiful buttocks.” In another story about mutating bottoms, scientists at Cornell have discovered that disabling a gene can turn a tomato from round to pear-shaped. Without the gene, appropriately named OVATE, a fruit will grow more at the top, leading to a long neck and bulbous base. The missing gene is likely to be the reason that squash, eggplants, and, well, pears are shaped as they are. Most wild fruit are round, and it is suggested that humans bred elongated fruit for aesthetic reasons. You betcha.

Worm slaps Penguin

It may be Microsoft’s time to feel a little smug. For years Redmond has been the butt of jokes — and curses — for the vulnerability its systems seemed to have to viruses. Now Linux has fallen prey to a nasty bug of its own, one that has created a giant peer-to-peer attack network from thousands of infected Linux Web servers. Only computer systems running both Apache Web server software and the Linux operating system are vulnerable, New Scientist reports. But that’s a heck of a lot of machines. Once installed on a machine, the Linux.Slapper.Worm tries to forward itself on to other computers. “But unlike many other worms, it also tries to establish connections with computers that have already been infected,” the magazine reports. The bug was first identified Friday, and though characterized by computer security firms as slow-moving, has so far infected an estimated 3,500 machines. In a note accompanying the worm, the author says it was designed as a proof-of-concept for “educational” purposes and should not be used for destructive attacks.

Texas researchers develop Ricin vaccine

Texas researchers have developed a vaccine in mice against the deadly toxin Ricin, which has been used in the past as a biological weapon. Ricin is a protein produced by castor beans, making it one of the simplest and cheapest bioweapons to produce. Ricin can be administered in foods, water and through the air, and a single Ricin molecule inside a cell is enough to shut down protein synthesis and kill it. But researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas say that by removing snippets of the Ricin DNA, they were able to develop two strains of mutated Ricin that stimulate an immune response in mice, but cause no harm. The researchers say they believe one or both of the strains would be safe for use in humans. According to the UT team, Iraq is known to have stockpiles of Ricin as part of its bioweapons program, while at least one group associated with Al Qaeda is thought to have experimented with the toxin.

When rashes kill

A new reports says that up to half of all U.S. residents may be ineligible for smallpox vaccination because of the growing incidence of eczema. In a report appearing in the September issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Dr. Renata J.M. Engler from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, and colleagues note that in people with eczema, exposure to vaccinia — a relative of smallpox used to inoculate people — or even contact with someone who was recently vaccinated can cause a condition that can lead to scarring, blindness and even death. “A major challenge lies in the ability to protect the population from the disease while minimizing the considerable side effects from the vaccine,” Reuters quotes from their report. The researchers say more studies should be conducted to help identify people who are prone to side vaccinia effects. Others who should avoid smallpox vaccination include people with immune deficiency diseases such as AIDS, and those on immune system-suppressing drugs, such as transplant patients.

Cancer detector works both ways

Dual use technology usually starts out with a military use that civilians find a way to commercialize. The U.S. Navy is hoping to turn that equation around with a $5 million program to improve breast cancer detection. As it happens, looking for a cancerous cell in a human breast relies on a lot of the same science as identifying targets in spy satellite photos. And since the Navy believes its current pick-’em-out technology has hit a ceiling, it hopes to develop advances in breast cancer screening that can be applied to spotting Osama bin Laden from space. Wired has a terrific story on this, and notes that real-world applications are already emerging.

West Nile heads west

A Los Angeles County woman has tested positive for West Nile virus in what is likely to be the first case of a person contracting the illness west of the Rockies, state health officials said today. Today’s preliminary results are expected to be confirmed by further tests next week. The unidentified woman, who is being treated for meningitis, had not traveled outside the region, which would indicate that the infection, if confirmed, occurred locally. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 43 people have died so far this year from the disease, which is spread by mosquitos (or possibly through organ transplants).

Thank you Mr. Farnsworth!

From Barney W. Greinke in Berkeley:

“When people point out the great technological accomplishments of the 20th century, they usually think it’s the big things that are the most important ones. The atom bomb, jet airplanes, the Salk vaccine, electronic computing, DNA, men on the moon.

“How incredibly wrong they are.