An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Researchers have created cloned mice from freeze dried skin cells in a world first that aims to help conservationists revive populations of endangered species. The breakthrough paves the way for countries to store skin cells from animals as an insurance policy, as the cells can be used to create clones that boost the species’ genetic diversity if they become threatened with extinction in the future. While scientists have used frozen cells to produce clones for conservation projects, the cells are kept in liquid nitrogen which is expensive and risky: if there are power outages or the liquid nitrogen is not regularly topped up, the cells melt and become unusable. Freeze dried sperm can also be used to create clones, but cannot be obtained from all animals.

In the latest work, researchers froze dried skin cells from mouse tails and stored them for up to nine months before trying to create clones from them. The freeze-drying processes killed the cells, but the scientists found they could still create early stage cloned embryos by inserting the dead cells into mouse eggs that had their own nuclei removed. These early stage mouse embryos, known as blastocysts, were used to create stocks of stem cells that were put through another round of cloning. The stem cells were inserted into mouse eggs emptied of their own nuclei, leading to embryos that surrogate mice carried to term. The first cloned mouse, named Dorami after a melon bread-loving robot in the Doraemon Manga series, was followed by 74 more. To check whether the clones had healthy fertility, nine females and three males were bred with normal mice. All the females went on to have litters.

Despite the achievement, the process is inefficient — freeze drying damaged DNA in the skin cells — and the success rate for creating healthy female and male mouse pups was only 0.2 to 5.4%. In some of the cells, the Y chromosome was lost, leading to female mice being born from cells obtained from male animals. “If the same treatment could be performed in endangered species where only males survived, it would be possible to produce females and naturally preserve the species, the authors write in Nature Communications.

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Source: Slashdot – Cloned Mice Created From Freeze Dried Skin Cells In World First

In a study conducted in Columbus, researchers found that neighborhoods with more dogs had lower rates of homicide, robbery and, to a lesser extent, aggravated assaults compared to areas with fewer dogs, at least when residents also had high levels of trust in each other. Phys.Org reports: The results suggest that people walking their dogs puts more “eyes on the street,” which can discourage crime, said Nicolo Pinchak, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in sociology at The Ohio State University. “People walking their dogs are essentially patrolling their neighborhoods,” Pinchak said. “They see when things are not right, and when there are suspect outsiders in the area. It can be a crime deterrent.”

For the study, researchers looked at crime statistics from 2014 to 2016 for 595 census block groups — the equivalent of neighborhoods — in the Columbus area. They obtained survey data from a marketing firm that asked Columbus residents in 2013 if they had a dog in their household. Finally, they used data from the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study (which Browning runs) to measure trust in individual neighborhoods. As part of that study, residents were asked to rate how much they agreed that “people on the streets can be trusted” in their neighborhoods. Research has shown that trust among neighbors is an important part of deterring crime, because it suggests residents will help each other when facing a threat and have a sense of “collective efficacy” that they can have a positive impact on their area, Pinchak said.

Results of this study showed, as expected, that neighborhoods with high levels of trust had lower levels of homicide, robbery and aggravated assaults when compared to neighborhoods with low levels of trust. But among high-trust neighborhoods, those with high concentrations of dogs showed an additional drop in crime compared to those with low concentrations of dogs. Among the high-trust neighborhoods, neighborhoods high in dog concentration had about two-thirds the robbery rates of those low in dog concentration and about half the homicide rates, the study found. It really has to do with the dog walking, Pinchak said. […] Results showed that the trust and dog-walking combination helped reduce street crimes: those crimes like homicides and robberies that tend to occur in public locations, including streets and sidewalks. The study found that more dogs in a neighborhood was also related to fewer property crimes, like burglaries, irrespective of how much residents trust each other, Pinchak said. […] The protective effect of dogs and trust was found even when a wide range of other factors related to crime was taken into account, including the proportion of young males in the neighborhood, residential instability and socioeconomic status. The study was published in the journal Social Forces.

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Source: Slashdot – More Dogs In the Neighborhood Often Means Less Crime

Microsoft is planning to remove Xbox 360 games from its monthly Games with Gold offer in October. The Verge reports: The software maker has started emailing Xbox Live Gold subscribers to warn them of the change, noting that the company has “reached the limit of our ability to bring Xbox 360 games to the catalogue.” Games with Gold is a monthly benefit for subscribers of Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Microsoft hand picks free games each month, and all Xbox 360 titles are playable on the latest Xbox Series X / S consoles and Xbox One.

Microsoft’s Xbox backward compatibility program briefly returned with 76 new games last year, but the company made it clear it had “reached the limit of our ability to bring new games to the catalog from the past due to licensing, legal and technical constraints.” That would explain why it has now reached the limit on new Xbox 360 titles for Games with Gold. If you’ve already downloaded or redeemed Xbox 360 games through Games with Gold, this change won’t impact those titles. This just means starting October 1st, Microsoft won’t be adding any additional Xbox 360 titles to the Games with Gold offering.

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Source: Slashdot – Xbox 360 games Will No Longer Be Part of Xbox Games With Gold In October

One of the GNOME developers has suggested that the next major release of Gtk could drop support for the X window system. The Register reports: Emmanuele Bassi opened a discussion last week on the GNOME project’s Gitlab instance that asked whether the developers could drop X.11 support in the next release of Gtk. At this point, it is only a suggestion, but if it gets traction, this could significantly accelerate the move to the Wayland display server and the end of X.11.

Don’t panic: Gtk 5 is not imminent. Gtk is a well-established toolkit, originally designed for the GIMP bitmap editing program back in 1998. Gtk 4 arrived relatively recently, shortly before the release of GNOME 40 in 2021. GNOME 40 has new user-interface guidelines, and as a part of this, Gtk 4 builds GNOME’s Adwaita theme into the toolkit by means of the new libadwaita library, which is breaking the appearance of some existing apps.

Also, to be fair, as we recently covered, the X window system is very old now and isn’t seeing major changes, although new releases of parts of it do still happen. This discussion is almost certain to get wildly contentious, and the thread on Gitlab has been closed to further comments for now. If this idea gains traction, one likely outcome might well be a fork of Gtk, just as happened when GNOME 3 came out. […] A lot of the features of the current version, X.11, are no longer used or relevant to most users. Even so, X.12 is barely even in the planning stages yet.

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Source: Slashdot – Gtk 5 Might Drop X.11 Support, Says GNOME Dev

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: After causing outrage among online services including Cloudflare, the most aggressive pirate site injunction ever handed down in the US has undergone significant weight loss surgery. Now before the court is a heavily modified injunction that is most notable for everything that’s been removed. It appears that Cloudflare drew a very clear line in the sand and refused to step over it. […] The injunctions granted extreme powers, from residential ISP blocking to almost any other action the plaintiffs deemed fit to keep the sites offline. Almost immediately that led to friction with third-party service providers and the situation only worsened when a concerned Cloudflare found itself threatened with contempt of court for non-compliance. The CDN company fought back with support from Google and EFF and that led the parties back to the negotiating table. Filings in the case last week suggested an acceptance by the plaintiffs that the injunction cannot be enforced in its present form. The parties promised to work on a new injunction to address both sides’ concerns and as a result, a new proposal now awaits the court’s approval. […]

With the contempt of court issue behind them, Cloudflare and the plaintiffs appear to have settled their differences. An entire section in the injunction dedicated to Cloudflare suggests that the CDN company is indeed prepared to help the video companies but they’ll have to conform to certain standards. Before even contacting Cloudflare they’ll first need to make “reasonable, good faith efforts to identify and obtain relief for the identified domains from hosting providers and domain name registries and registrars.”

If the plaintiffs still need Cloudflare’s assistance, Cloudflare will comply with requests against domain names listed in this injunction and future injunctions by preventing access to the following: “Pass-through security services, content delivery network (CDN) services, video streaming services, and authoritative DNS services, DNS, CDN, streaming services, and any related services.” An additional note states that the plaintiffs acknowledge that Cloudflare’s compliance “will not necessarily prevent the Defendants from providing users with access to Defendants’ infringing services.” Given the agreement on the terms, the amended injunction will likely be signed off by the court in the coming days. Service providers everywhere will breathe a sigh of relief while rightsholders will have a template for similar cases moving forward. The proposed amended injunction documents can be found here (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 pdf).

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Source: Slashdot – Broadest US Pirate Site Injunction Rewritten/Tamed By Cloudflare