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DNA Mutations Discovered In the Children of Chernobyl Workers

Researchers performed genome sequencing scans on 130 people whose fathers were Chernobyl cleanup workers. Comparing the scans to control groups, they found evidence for the first time for "a transgenerational effect" from the father's prolonged exposure to low-dose ionizing radiation.

ScienceAlert reports:



Rather than picking out new DNA mutations in the next generation, they looked for what are known as clustered de novo mutations (cDNMs): two or more mutations in close proximity, found in the children but not the parents. These would be mutations resulting from breaks in the parental DNA caused by radiation exposure. "We found a significant increase in the cDNM count in offspring of irradiated parents, and a potential association between the dose estimations and the number of cDNMs in the respective offspring," write the researchers in their published paper...

What's more, a higher radiation dose for the parent tended to mean a higher number of clusters in the child. This fits with the idea that radiation creates molecules known as reactive oxygen species, which are able to break DNA strands — breaks which can leave behind the clusters described in this study, if repaired imperfectly.

The good news is that the risk to health should be relatively small: children of exposed parents weren't found to have any higher risk of disease. This is partly because a lot of the cDNMs likely fall in 'non-coding' DNA, rather than in genes that directly encode proteins.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oldest Active Linux Distro Slackware Finally Releases Version 15.0

Created in 1993, Slackware is considered the oldest Linux distro that's still actively maintained. And more than three decades later... there's a new release! (And there's also a Slackware Live Edition that can run from a DVD or USB stick...)
.


Slackware's latest version was released way back in 2016, notes the blog It's FOSS:


The major highlight of Slackware 15 is the addition of the latest Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS. This is a big jump from Linux Kernel 5.10 LTS that we noticed in the beta release. Interestingly, the Slackware team tested hundreds of Linux Kernel versions before settling on Linux Kernel 5.15.19. The release note mentions... "We finally ended up on kernel version 5.15.19 after Greg Kroah-Hartman confirmed that it would get long-term support until at least October 2023 (and quite probably for longer than that)."

In case you are curious, Linux Kernel 5.15 brings in updates like enhanced NTFS driver support and improvements for Intel/AMD processors and Apple's M1 chip. It also adds initial support for Intel 12th gen processors. Overall, with Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS, you should get a good hardware compatibility result for the oldest active Linux distro.


Slackware's announcement says "The challenge this time around was to adopt as much of the good stuff out there as we could without changing the character of the operating system. Keep it familiar, but make it modern."


And boy did we have our work cut out for us. We adopted privileged access management (PAM) finally, as projects we needed dropped support for pure shadow passwords. We switched from ConsoleKit2 to elogind, making it much easier to support software that targets that Other Init System and bringing us up-to-date with the XDG standards. We added support for PipeWire as an alternate to PulseAudio, and for Wayland sessions in addition to X11. Dropped Qt4 and moved entirely to Qt5. Brought in Rust and Python 3. Added many, many new libraries to the system to help support all the various additions.

We've upgraded to two of the finest desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.16, a fast and lightweight but visually appealing and easy to use desktop environment, and the KDE Plasma 5 graphical workspaces environment, version 5.23.5 (the Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition). This also supports running under Wayland or X11. We still love Sendmail, but have moved it into the /extra directory and made Postfix the default mail handler. The old imapd and ipop3d have been retired and replaced by the much more featureful Dovecot IMAP and POP3 server.


"As usual, the kernel is provided in two flavors, generic and huge," according to the release notes. "The huge kernel contains enough built-in drivers that in most cases an initrd is not needed to boot the system."

If you'd like to support Slackware, there's an official Patreon account.
And the release announcement ends with this personal note:


Sadly, we lost a couple of good friends during this development cycle and this release is dedicated to them. Erik "alphageek" Jan Tromp passed away in 2020 after a long illness... My old friend Brett Person also passed away in 2020. Without Brett, it's possible that there wouldn't be any Slackware as we know it — he's the one who encouraged me to upload it to FTP back in 1993 and served as Slackware's original beta-tester. He was long considered a co-founder of this project. I knew Brett since the days of the Beggar's Banquet BBS in Fargo back in the 1980's... Gonna miss you too, pal.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader rastos1 for sharing thre news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fake Job Recruiters Hid Malware In Developer Coding Challenges

"A new variation of the fake recruiter campaign from North Korean threat actors is targeting JavaScript and Python developers with cryptocurrency-related tasks," reports the Register.


Researchers at software supply-chain security company ReversingLabs say that the threat actor creates fake companies in the blockchain and crypto-trading sectors and publishes job offerings on various platforms, like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit. Developers applying for the job are required to show their skills by running, debugging, and improving a given project. However, the attacker's purpose is to make the applicant run the code... [The campaign involves 192 malicious packages published in the npm and PyPi registries. The packages download a remote access trojan that
can exfiltrate files, drop additional payloads, or execute arbitrary commands sent from a command-and-control server.]


In one case highlighted in the ReversingLabs report, a package named 'bigmathutils,' with 10,000 downloads, was benign until it reached version 1.1.0, which introduced malicious payloads. Shortly after, the threat actor removed the package, marking it as deprecated, likely to conceal the activity... The RAT checks whether the MetaMask cryptocurrency extension is installed on the victim's browser, a clear indication of its money-stealing goals...

ReversingLabs has found multiple variants written in JavaScript, Python, and VBS, showing an intention to cover all possible targets.

The campaign has been ongoing since at least May 2025...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sargasso

Hopeloos Genuanceerd

Closing Time | Avantasia

Over smaak valt niet te twisten. Maar: metal-opera’s zijn vet. Geen kwestie van smaak, gewoon, feit. Ahum, hoe dan ook: wij in Nederland hebben Ayreon, die jullie natuurlijk kennen, maar onze oosterburen hebben Avantasia. Ook leuk, luister zelf!

There's a Wolf Out in the Corn

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

There's a Wolf Out in the Corn

Sunset on the Straits of Juan de Fuca

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Sunset on the Straits of Juan de Fuca

The Guardian

Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

Authorities appeal for video footage as Nancy Guthrie search enters third week with no arrests

Authorities ask neighbors within two-mile radius to send in any home video footage as search draws national attention

The search for Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of NBC’s Today show anchor Savannah Guthrie, has entered its third week, as investigators ask neighbors within a two-mile radius to send in any home video footage.

Nancy Guthrie was last seen on the evening of 31 January, when she was dropped off at her home in the Catalina foothills north of Tucson, Arizona, after having dinner with her older daughter and son-in-law. She was reported missing the following day, after she failed to arrive at a friend’s house to watch a church service.

Continue reading...

The Education of Jane Cumming review – sexuality, race and a real school scandal

Berlin film festival
Sophie Heldman’s drama about two teachers accused of lesbianism by a pupil is exhilaratingly candid

Lillian Hellman’s stage play The Children’s Hour – filmed by William Wyler in 1961 with Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn – is the well-known, earnest story of two women teaching at a private girls’ school whose lives are ruined by a pupil’s malicious accusation of homosexuality: it’s one of the earliest Hollywood movies to tiptoe around the existence of gay people, albeit clearly permitted to exist on the understanding that the people involved are really not gay.

But until this moment I knew nothing about the real-life libel case from 19th-century Scotland on which it was based, which in 2013 was the subject of a study by LGBT scholar Lillian Faderman entitled Scotch Verdict: The Real-Life Story That Inspired The Children’s Hour.

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MetaFilter

The past 24 hours of MetaFilter

I ♡ Roguelikes

Scoundrel is a solitaire game played with ordinary playing cards. It's also a solo dungeon adventure. Read the rules (PDF, alternate PDFs,) watch a tutorial and playthrough (~8 min.,) or play in your browser.

I've become low-key obssessed with this type of "Roguelike Solitaire" game, and Scoundrel—developed by Zach Gage and Kurt Bieg—may be the most influential. It was released in 2011 and has seen spikes in interest over the years, with its latest boost coming via this explanatory video from the Riffle Shuffle & Roll YouTube channel. Scoundrel Rules Summary:
  1. Before play, remove the red Aces and Face cards and Jokers (they are not used.)
    • Note your starting health at 20.
    • Cards are valued at their number, with Aces high. So, 2-14.
  2. Deal four cards to create a room. Clearing three of them starts the next room (the fourth follows/is carried to the next room.)
  3. After a room is dealt you can flee (but not twice in a row.) Scoop all the room cards and put them at the bottom of the deck.
  4. Black cards are monsters. They must be defeated to be cleared.
    • You always defeat them, but they will deal [their number] damage.
  5. Diamonds are weapons. They must be equipped to be cleared.
    • They block [their number] damage when used.
    • You can only equip one weapon at a time (place it below the room cards and discard any previous weapon.)
    • Fresh weapons can attack anything, but once used they can only be used against a weaker monster. Put the last monster killed by your weapon next to it as an indicator.
    • If you don't have, can't use, or don't want to use a weapon you fight barehanded and take full damage.
  6. Hearts are healing potions. They must be drunk to be cleared.
    • They restore [their number] points of health, up to your max of 20.
    • Only the first potion taken per room will have any effect.
  7. If you win, your score is your health (plus the value of the last card, if it was a potion.) If you lose, it's zero minus the value of the remaining monsters.
Notes: You can flee from good rooms, which is a useful way to move items and/or weaker monsters to the endgame. It's often wise to fight barehanded to avoid degrading your weapon. There seems to be some confusion about whether a monster that kills you is considered defeated for the purpose of scoring, but my reading of the rules is that you take it with you. The weapon degradation mechanic is interesting, but does conjure an amusing image of wielding a weapon with corpses impaled upon it. In true roguelike fashion, Scoundrel is hard. Even with decent strategy you can expect to lose at least 3/4ths of your games. The deck is literally stacked against you: the black cards deal 208 points of damage while you can recover 54 from potions. The diamonds have to do some heavy lifting. Since there are extra cards just sitting there, various homebrew rules have been created, most of which are some kind of aid to the player. The most popular are adding some or all of the red cards back as characters like blacksmiths (who can remove monsters from a weapon) or merchants (who will trade you health for weapons.) If you don't play a variant that re-introduces red face cards, you can use them to keep track of health: Jack = 1, Queen = 2, King = 3, Ace = 4 (i.e. 10 less than their game values.) Flip them to indicate damage. This keeps the entirety of the game confined to a standard deck of cards, at the cost of extra playing space. Alternately, you could use just five cards and practice your binary arithmetic (20 is 10100.) There have been numerous ports of Scoundrel to the web and mobile platforms, and even several for PICO-8, and at least one for the Playdate. Fans have made themed physical card decks (YT, downloadable art in the description) and 3D printable cases for the cards. One redditor came up with a method of playing it in one hand. LEGACY Card Crawl Released in 2015 (I think; that's when its awards are dated) Card Crawl is a game for iOS/Android/Steam. It was inspired by Scoundrel and extends it in a few ways, including adding inventory and the use of both hands and a bag to manage it. It also adds special cards that put it out of the realm of playable with a standard deck. Donsol Designed by John Eternal, Donsol was originally released in 2016 as a mobile game. It "accidentally ended up quite similar" to Scoundrel. Currently, Donsol ROMs are available for Nintendo and Uxn/Varvara platforms. There's also a browser-playable implementation at the top of that page that's easy to overlook. The download page summarizes the game as well as I could, but the biggest difference from Scoundrel is that red faces and aces are used with all worth 11 points, which would be a help for the player, but black Queens are now 13, Kings 15, Aces 17, and Jokers (Donsols) are 21 point monsters. If you thought Scoundrel was going too easy on you, give this a try. Mythic Dungeon Crawler Released in 2022 as part of a Kickstarter for fantasy-themed playing cards, this takes inspiration from Card Crawl but is playable with a standard (ideally fantasy-themed) deck. The rules are free to download , along with an optional playmat (actually two, with different styles of health counters,) and an "expansion" that gives a map with different buffs/debuffs per room. There's a semi-official Mythic Dungeon playthrough by games YouTuber Sir Thecos (skip the first 12 min. if you don't want to see the pretty cards.) Note that he was working from an earlier version of the rules and some clarifications have been made since. In particular, he's under the impression that potions must be taken upon being handled (Scoundrel-style.) Mythic Dungeon Crawler Summary: Play is as Scoundrel, except:
  1. All cards are used, including two Jokers.
    • Your health starts at 20, but optionally ("Easy Difficulty") can be set to 25.
    • Red faces and aces are called 'allies' (diamonds) and 'healers' (hearts) but functionally are higher value versions of the pip cards. Aces are high and worth 14.
  2. Fled rooms are shuffled into the deck.
    • If the room has a monster with weapon damage (carried over from the previous room,) the weapon is discarded before shuffling.
    • You can flee twice in a row, but the second time you take five points "fear" damage. You can't flee thrice in a row.
  3. You have three spaces for holding inventory, two hands and one bag.
    • You must have a free hand to equip a weapon or drink a potion.
    • Your bag can hold one extra item. You can't use items from the bag without a free hand space, but you can swap items between hand and bag if they haven't been used (i.e. no monsters on shields or Jokers.)
    • Slain monsters are looted by placing them face down in your bag, unless the space is used to hold an item, in which case they are discarded. (The cards are your score.)
    • You're allowed to discard an item from the room if you have no free spaces in your inventory.
  4. Diamonds can function as weapons OR shields, depending on whether you attack or "provoke" a monster into attacking you. You decide when it is first used.
    • If used as a weapon, place it on a monster. If the weapon is equal or higher, the monster is looted and the weapon discarded. If not, the monster now has a value of the difference.
    • If used as a shield, place the monster on it. If shield is higher, it now has a value of the difference. If not, the shield is discarded and any difference is applied as damage. Loot the monster you provoked and any on the shield.
    • With two shields, only one can block each attack.
    • Shields may not be discarded if they are partially used.
    • Monsters can be "provoked" into attacking you whether or not you have (or wish to use) a shield (similar to barehanded fighting in Scoundrel.)
  5. Jokers take up an inventory space, but they can in turn hold one card (including monsters) and optionally return it to the dungeon (if there's an empty room space.)
    • The Joker is discarded once the item on it is used or moved (e.g., between hand and bag.)
  6. Your score is the number of monster cards in your bag (not their value) when you exit the dungeon. There is no score if you lose. Scores are for winners.
There are also rules for the specific decks they sell, which are effectively variant rules. The earlier rules on the Kickstarter page has more of them, which are related to the art on their cards. Notes: Mythic Dungeon Crawler is much more winnable than Scoundrel; I manage in the 80% range. The diamonds are nerfed (e.g., a ten will block ten points damage, vs. an ideal 94 in Scoundrel), but the inventory system and additional red cards more than make up for that. The extra hearts alone add another 50 potential health points. There is still room for some clarification in the rules, e.g. at the end of the dungeon, do monsters on a shield count for your score (I'm guessing yes,) and can you leave while holding a monster on a Joker? (I'm guessing no.) The game design has some indavertently(?) amusing implications. The "allies" (red faces and aces) take a space, so you apparently have to hold their hands (or stuff them in your bag!) You're also constantly "provoking" monsters who seem to be unwilling to attack you otherwise, you jerk. Zach Gage has many previouslies, mostly games, on the blue: 2022, 2019, 2016-05, 2016-03, 2009.

Rijnmond - Nieuws

Het laatste nieuws van vandaag over Rotterdam, Feyenoord, het verkeer en het weer in de regio Rijnmond

Grote lekkage in verpleeghuis: oudere bewoners zonder stroom, water en verwarming

In een verpleeghuis De Burcht in Rotterdam-Alexander is zondagmiddag rond 17:15 uur behoorlijke lekkage ontstaan. De hoofdwaterleiding van het gebouw aan de Van Moorselplaats is gesprongen. Het water is afgesloten en de lekkage is gestopt, maar de gevolgen voor de voornamelijk oudere bewoners zijn nog onduidelijk.