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Cheaper IVF
ANDREW KELLY / REUTERS
UPFRONT
A second Snowden? WE ARE getting closer to unmasking the Shadow Brokers. Last week, the group put hacking tools from the National Security Agency up for auction, including security flaws in companies’ systems and remote access tools. There have been no serious bidders, but the documents have been confirmed as the real deal, raising the spectre of another whistleblower at the agency. Initially, the prime suspect was Russia, but this theory has now been downgraded. Certain naming conventions in the files point to scripts only accessible on a machine physically isolated from the network and therefore inaccessible to anyone not physically present in the NSA building. The idea that it was an accidental upload has also
been debunked, shifting the focus internally. However, it couldn’t have been Edward Snowden, pictured, as it looks like the tools were stolen around October 2013, five months after he fled to Hong Kong. On Monday, Shlomo Argamon at the Illinois Institute of Technology, analysed the broken English Shadow Brokers used to sell the tools, examining, for example, patterns of grammatical errors. He concluded that the author was a native English speaker trying to appear non-native. A bogus accent, in other words, but a pretty good attempt to cover it up. All of that would point to an NSA insider motivated to leak documents, but also to cover their own tracks to avoid a fate similar to Snowden’s.
US wind power
the capacity for 11,000 megawatts of electricity. The US already gets about 5 per cent of the electrical power it produces from inland wind energy – more than 70,000 megawatts in 2015. Wind tends to be stronger and more stable over the ocean, says Deepwater Wind CEO Jeffrey Grybowski. The ocean breeze is also generally strongest during the late afternoon and early evening, when electricity demand peaks. This make offshore areas an attractive location for future development, he says.
–Looking inward-
Cheaper IVF
growth factors that stimulate egg maturation into a single compound for use in IVM. This technique should also be quicker than standard IVF, which typically takes around a month per cycle of treatment. “With IVM, five days after a minor surgery you have an embryo ready to put back,” says Ledger. Gilchrist’s team presented the results this week at the Society for Reproductive Biology conference in Queensland. They plan to begin implanting embryos produced this way as part of a clinical trial next year.
FINALLY, a breakthrough for cheaper, faster, drug-free IVF. Conventional IVF usually involves taking hormone injections for around 10 days, to stimulate egg maturation. This
procedure is unpleasant, can cause serious side effects, and is also expensive. “About half of the cost of IVF is the drug cost,” says William Ledger at the University of New South Wales, Australia. An alternative is to remove a woman’s eggs while they are still immature and mature them in the lab before fertilising them. But this technique – called IVM – is less successful. As of last year, only around 400 babies worldwide had been born using this method. Now Ledger’s colleague, Robert Gilchrist, has found a way to increase the number of embryos produced by IVM by 50 per cent. He did this by combining two 6 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016
NASA/GFSC
“Five days after a minor surgery, you have an embryo ready to implant back in a woman”
THE turbines at the first offshore wind farm in the US were installed last week, and their blades are set to start generating power by the end of the year. The Block Island Wind Farm, developed by Deepwater Wind in Providence, Rhode Island, will be able to produce enough power for 17,000 homes – up to 30 megawatts. That’s much less than many of the offshore wind farms in the UK and Europe generate, some of which contain more than 100 turbines and together have
We’ve got STEREO NASA is back in touch with one of a pair of sun-watching spacecraft after nearly two years of silence. The twin STEREO spacecraft were launched in 2006 to study coronal mass ejections and were supposed to communicate with Earth every day. A mission extension then took the spacecraft to the opposite side of the sun from Earth, where they would be unable to radio back for –Contact restored– at least two months.
UPFRONT
A second Snowden? WE ARE getting closer to unmasking the Shadow Brokers. Last week, the group put hacking tools from the National Security Agency up for auction, including security flaws in companies’ systems and remote access tools. There have been no serious bidders, but the documents have been confirmed as the real deal, raising the spectre of another whistleblower at the agency. Initially, the prime suspect was Russia, but this theory has now been downgraded. Certain naming conventions in the files point to scripts only accessible on a machine physically isolated from the network and therefore inaccessible to anyone not physically present in the NSA building. The idea that it was an accidental upload has also
been debunked, shifting the focus internally. However, it couldn’t have been Edward Snowden, pictured, as it looks like the tools were stolen around October 2013, five months after he fled to Hong Kong. On Monday, Shlomo Argamon at the Illinois Institute of Technology, analysed the broken English Shadow Brokers used to sell the tools, examining, for example, patterns of grammatical errors. He concluded that the author was a native English speaker trying to appear non-native. A bogus accent, in other words, but a pretty good attempt to cover it up. All of that would point to an NSA insider motivated to leak documents, but also to cover their own tracks to avoid a fate similar to Snowden’s.
US wind power
the capacity for 11,000 megawatts of electricity. The US already gets about 5 per cent of the electrical power it produces from inland wind energy – more than 70,000 megawatts in 2015. Wind tends to be stronger and more stable over the ocean, says Deepwater Wind CEO Jeffrey Grybowski. The ocean breeze is also generally strongest during the late afternoon and early evening, when electricity demand peaks. This make offshore areas an attractive location for future development, he says.
–Looking inward-
Cheaper IVF
growth factors that stimulate egg maturation into a single compound for use in IVM. This technique should also be quicker than standard IVF, which typically takes around a month per cycle of treatment. “With IVM, five days after a minor surgery you have an embryo ready to put back,” says Ledger. Gilchrist’s team presented the results this week at the Society for Reproductive Biology conference in Queensland. They plan to begin implanting embryos produced this way as part of a clinical trial next year.
FINALLY, a breakthrough for cheaper, faster, drug-free IVF. Conventional IVF usually involves taking hormone injections for around 10 days, to stimulate egg maturation. This
procedure is unpleasant, can cause serious side effects, and is also expensive. “About half of the cost of IVF is the drug cost,” says William Ledger at the University of New South Wales, Australia. An alternative is to remove a woman’s eggs while they are still immature and mature them in the lab before fertilising them. But this technique – called IVM – is less successful. As of last year, only around 400 babies worldwide had been born using this method. Now Ledger’s colleague, Robert Gilchrist, has found a way to increase the number of embryos produced by IVM by 50 per cent. He did this by combining two 6 | NewScientist | 27 August 2016
NASA/GFSC
“Five days after a minor surgery, you have an embryo ready to implant back in a woman”
THE turbines at the first offshore wind farm in the US were installed last week, and their blades are set to start generating power by the end of the year. The Block Island Wind Farm, developed by Deepwater Wind in Providence, Rhode Island, will be able to produce enough power for 17,000 homes – up to 30 megawatts. That’s much less than many of the offshore wind farms in the UK and Europe generate, some of which contain more than 100 turbines and together have
We’ve got STEREO NASA is back in touch with one of a pair of sun-watching spacecraft after nearly two years of silence. The twin STEREO spacecraft were launched in 2006 to study coronal mass ejections and were supposed to communicate with Earth every day. A mission extension then took the spacecraft to the opposite side of the sun from Earth, where they would be unable to radio back for –Contact restored– at least two months.