Category Archives: Evolution

Image: Statue of Charles Darwin atNatural History Museum in London

The 12th of February 2021 marks Sir Charles Darwins 212th birthday a day when biologists and many others remember one of the greatest scientists to have ever lived, whose work and theories transformed biology and the world.

Sir Charles Darwins observations that species adapt through variations passed on from one generation to the next is the basis of modern biology a deceptively simple rule that accounts for all of the variation we see in the natural world.

All organisms, big and small, evolve over time to adapt to the environments they inhabit and the same is true for cancer. Understanding evolution is key to the study of cancer and to developing new treatments for the disease. Its also pretty important when it comes to fighting viruses like Covid-19.

This Darwin Day, we spoke to two of our researchers working in the ICRs Centre for Evolution and Cancer, who are building on Darwins theories of evolution to explore new ways to treat cancer.

The ICR's Centre for Evolution and Cancer aims to apply Charles Darwins principle of natural selection to our understanding of why we develop cancer and why it is so difficult to treat.

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Dr Alejandra Bruna is leader of the Preclinical Modelling of Paediatric Cancer Evolution Team, and she is trying to find the evolutionary components that drive cancer in children.

The ICR is an internationally leading research centre in the study of cancer in children, and Dr Brunas work focuses on neuroblastoma, the most commonly fatal solid tumour in children, among other solid paediatric cancers.

One of the main features of cancer is genomic instability, with most adult cancers displaying high levels of mutations which cancer is able to exploit for survival.

Following Darwins theories of Natural Selection, each mutation could potentially help a cancer cell adapt to its environment better to survive, with beneficial adaptations being passed on through cell division.

Preventing or targeting mutations is an important way to treat cancer, but childhood cancers often display very few mutations, and researchers like Dr Bruna think that there may be different evolutionary forces at work.

Her research is looking at epigenetic changes in childhood cancer cells changes to genes that arent caused by mutations, but that can turn genes on and off in cells.

Her team are investigating whether these epigenetic changes could be the driver for how neuroblastoma cells evolve, which could explain how cancer cells with very few mutations can adapt and develop resistance to treatments.

Dr Bruna says, If non-genetic evolution plays a role in resistance to therapy in paediatric tumours, then we should be trying to focus on finding treatments that target these non-genetic events.

She is using a technique to barcode cells in samples of neuroblastoma, to trace cell dynamics and epigenetic changes over time, which may identify the triggers for mutations that lead to resistance to treatment.

Finding the epigenetic changes that lead to resistance in neuroblastoma will be a challenge, but if they can show that they happen before mutations occur, this incredibly exciting discovery could open up new avenues for treatment for childhood cancers.

The ICRs Centre for Evolution and Cancer has developed sophisticated computer simulations to model how tumours evolve over time, but recreating the complexity of the disease seen in humans is still a huge challenge.

Diseases like prostate cancer are caused by hundreds of mutations that build up in cancer cells, so to understand how prostate cancer might evolve in patients, tests that help reflect this diversity are needed.

Dr Marco Bezzi leads the Tumour Functional Heterogeneity Team at the ICR, and he is using lab-grown mini-tumours called tumour organoids that more closely resemble cancer as its seen in the clinic, to better understand how prostate cancer evolves.

Dr Bezzi says, The ICRs mathematical modelling is really strong, and you can really follow how tumours develop through evolutionary principles. My research takes a very wet lab approach to complement this, by recreating the heterogeneity and selective pressures that cancer faces. We can then track this experimentally to understand how tumours evolve.

His lab generates biobanks of cancer organoids they use to mix together different mutations and grow tumour organoids with distinct genetic patterns.

These organoids can have several different mutations important to prostate cancer within one tumour, which can be studied in mice to see how these populations evolve.

Like Dr Brunas team, they hope to track how tumours evolve across generations of cancer cells using barcodes, to see which mutations give cells survival advantages and are passed on, and which die out.

Working together with mathematical modelling, ICR scientists can test how simulations of cancer evolution stand up to real-world examples to refine their predictions.

The goal is to use these different tools in the lab to understand how tumours in patients may evolve in response to treatment, so they can suggest new treatments as tumours adapt and help patients survive for longer.

These two examples take very different approaches to cancer evolution, but they show how this fundamental principle of life can be harnessed to learn more about cancer and design better ways to treat the disease.

Image: The ICR's Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery

Dr Bruna and Dr Bezzi have just moved into the ICRs new Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery, where researchers working in cancer evolution benefit from the expertise of their colleagues discovering new cancer drugs.

The building is the first of its kind to host hundreds of scientists from different disciplines under one roof to lead an unprecedented 'Darwinian' drug discovery programme that aims to overcome cancers ability to evolve resistance to drugs and herd it into more treatable forms.

The ultimate aim is to transform cancer into a manageable disease that can be controlled long term and effectively cured.

Dr Bezzi says, As a biotechnologist most of what I do is genetic engineering, so its fantastic to have access to the expertise of my colleagues in drug discovery.

By sharing the same spaces, we can share our expertise and knowledge. I can have those quick conversations about experiments and ask them what might be the best drug for a specific type of disease or for that specific patient. The connection we have to the clinic is amazing and it ensures that my work is studying the right questions to help patients.

In our pioneering Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery, our researchers are now developing a new generation of drugs that will make the difference to the lives of millions of people with cancer.

But we still need your support to help finish equipping the Centre and to continue to fund the exciting work that is now taking place within the building.

Donate now

As the world battles with the coronavirus pandemic, scientists can apply the same evolutionary thinking our researchers use in cancer to overcome Covid-19.

Professor Andrea Sottoriva, Director of the Centre for Evolution and Cancer in the Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery, says: Evolutionary biology is one of the most important theories of biology, in the same way that we have general relativity in physics. The theory of evolution allows us to make sense of the observations we see in biology and medicine more widely, and this is also true for the pandemic.

We understand how viruses evolve through the lens of evolutionary biology and we design new vaccines that combat the evolution of viruses to adapt and survive, like what we regularly see in the flu.

The variants we are now seeing in Covid-19 are evidence of the fundamental mechanisms that drive how all organisms evolve, including cancer.

Not every variation provides a survival advantage to viruses, making viruses more contagious or more resilient, and viruses often need a number of significant changes before vaccines will no longer work, but by studying how they change and evolve, doctors can attempt to get ahead of new variants with improved vaccines, helping curb transmission and save lives.

Dr Bruna said: Just like cancer, viruses are made of genetic material, and so they will evolve adaptations that are beneficial to the virus. But scientists will be expecting this and they are monitoring variations in the virus that are occurring.

With cancer the rules are exactly the same, and our researchers are coming up with new ways to model the disease's evolution and to find the triggers that help cancer develop.

And so, despite the death of Sir Charles Darwin more than 130 years ago, the impact of his work lives on and acts as inspiration for researchers around the world, and will continue to do so for generations to come.

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Science Talk - Evolution, cancer and coronavirus how biology's 'Theory of Everything' is key to fighting cancer and global pandemics - The Institute...

STOCKHOLM, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --

Fourth quarter of 2020 (Q4 2019)

Full-year 2020 (2019)

Comments from CEO Martin Carlesund:

We end an eventful 2020 on a high note with a quarter that marks a significant step forward for Evolution. Through the acquisition of NetEnt, we add a second vertical to our unrivalled Live Casino offer and two strong and fantastic new brands to our product portfolio. This makes us well-placed for our long-term ambition of taking a leading global position in online casino. With a strong market penetration in Live Casino and Slots across North America, Asia and Europe as our platform, we remain committed to creating the best gaming experience for every single user in both verticals. I am excited about what lies ahead for 2021 when we will continue to increase the gap to the competition.

Evolution Live had a strong fourth quarter with growth of 51% compared to the same period 2019. I am particularly pleased that we continue to see a positive momentum in player numbers and engagement levels. Games launched during 2020 have performed very well and recently we launched the first ever live version of Craps. We are now on our way with the roadmap for 2021, it is an intense time with releases being planned as I write this. During this year, we will further strengthen our Game Show-segment and increase the entertainment factor to attract and serve new player categories.

Our revenues during the quarter amounted to EUR 177.7 million, including EUR 17.8 million from NetEnt. The NetEnt acquisition was closed on the 1st of December 2020 so one full month of NetEnt is accounted for in the numbers. The underlying growth rate in the quarter compared to Evolution of Q419 was as stated above 51% and NetEnt had 5% growth for the full quarter compared to Q42019 reported figures.EBITDA in the quarter amounts to EUR 96.2 million which includes EUR 9.2 million from NetEnt in December and EUR 19.4 million in non-recurring restructuring related cost. EBITDA-margin is 54.2% in the quarter and adjusted for non-recurring items 65.1%. Currently, our outlook is to achieve the margin level of the fourth quarter 2020 also for full year 2021.

Since the day of the closure, I look at Evolution as one company with multiple strong products and brands. We acquired NetEnt because we believe that we together can create something great. To maximise the potential of this acquisition it was essential that we discarded existing structures and rapidly rebuild ourselves in a joint version. We were well prepared before the take-over and started the execution on day one. In the first month following the closure, we completed the planned integration. We will achieve approximately EUR 40 million of annual run-rate cost synergies which is 10 million more than earlier communicated. This effect will happen gradually during the two first quarters of 2021, about 6-9 months earlier compared to the pre-deal announcement.

In the years to come, we will continue to take advantage of the ongoing market regulation to strengthen our world-leading position in Live Casino and secure the continuous expansion of our Slots business into new markets while exploring additional product opportunities combining Live and RNG. With the competence and experience from both organisations now in one group, we will leverage our joint innovative capabilities and the common conviction that product innovation is the key to success.

Overall, there was good growth in all our regions during the latter part of 2020. Despite the effects that the pandemic has on society in general in the US, we have continued to expand in Pennsylvania and in early 2021 we also launched our NetEnt-brand slot games in Michigan. Our Live casino studio in Michigan is under construction and will be launched later this year. With several other states getting ready to regulate and our extended product offer - the US remains a high growth potential market for Evolution. This quarter also saw the launch of the newly regulated Colombian market. South America, as well as Africa, has a future potential for us as we continue to see demand on a global level.

The pandemic has continued to be a factor throughout the year. Our organic growth was solid already in the beginning of 2020, and I am pleased to see continued strong demand with many new players and high activity in the network throughout the year. Meanwhile, with the well-being of our teams in mind, the pandemic has brought on significant changes and challenges to work routines and impacted the timelines for construction of new studios as well as the total operating capacity. North America has been among those markets where it has been most difficult to operate and expand but it has been a demanding year for all of our markets and locations. I am impressed with the hard work, resilience and ingenuity of our employees in handling this and how they have come together to take us through the ever-changing context of 2020 with such strong results. Simply great work from every single one on the EVO-Team, Thank you.

In this time of change and growth it is important to note that Evolution's focus will remain centered on the same idea that the company was once founded upon - innovation and pushing boundaries. We operate on the firm belief that it is the best products and the most thrilling experiences that will attract players and continuously increase the gap to the competition. We know that the future of gaming lies in engaging and entertaining and that, as a leading actor of this fast-moving industry, we are in a unique position to drive this development. For our people, it means that every individual should strive to be just a little bit better every day.

As we close the first year of this decade, the exact rate of global conversion from land-based to online gaming remains unpredictable. However, the overarching trends are clear and there is no doubt that online will continue to grow at a high rate, fuelled by the overall trends in increased access to high-speed internet and market regulation. We have our growth runway laid out to meet this growing demand, and we will continue to invest in studio capacity and keep our relentless focus on product innovation and a flawless delivery by our team and striving to do better every day.

There is much to look forward to in 2021. We enter the new year with an intense and successful 2020 behind us, a proven strong, competent and energetic team and tremendous business momentum. 2021 is off to a strong start and I am excited to soon share more news from the group on how we plan to work with operators to take product innovation and player experience to the next level.

Presentation for investors, analysts and the mediaCEO Martin Carlesund and CFO Jacob Kaplan will present the report and answer questions on Wednesday, 10 February 2021 at 09:00 a.m. CET via a telephone conference. The presentation will be in English and can also be followed online:https://tv.streamfabriken.com/evolution-gaming-group-q4-2020

Number for participation by telephone:SE: +46 8 505 583 65UK: +44 333 300 90 30US: +1 833 249 84 07

For further information, please contact:CFO Jacob Kaplan, +46 708 62 33 94,[emailprotected].

This information is such that Evolution Gaming Group AB (publ) is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation. The information was submitted for publication, through the contact person set out above on 10 February 2021, at 7.30 am CET.

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

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A person receives a COVID-19 shot in Federal Way, Wash., at a vaccination clinic for the Pacific Islander Community Association of Washington held on Feb. 4. David Ryder/Getty Images hide caption

A person receives a COVID-19 shot in Federal Way, Wash., at a vaccination clinic for the Pacific Islander Community Association of Washington held on Feb. 4.

Mutations in the new coronavirus could reduce the effectiveness of vaccines against it. But vaccines themselves can also drive viral mutations, depending on exactly how the shots are deployed and how effective they are.

So far, vaccines still appear to work against the new strains though scientists are warily watching a variant that first appeared in South Africa since it seems to reduce vaccine effectiveness. And evolution isn't standing still, so scientists realize they may need to update vaccines to keep them working reliably.

What's going on here is somewhat similar to a larger, and more concerning problem in medicine: Many bacteria have gradually evolved the ability to survive even when walloped by a large dose of antibiotics. That problem has created new strains of deadly, drug-resistant germs.

Viruses also evolve, but the process is different and the result is usually much less severe when it comes to vaccines. When a virus such as the coronavirus infects someone, that person's immune system mounts a response. Viruses produce slight variations when they multiply, and if any of these variants can evade a person's immune response, those variants are more likely to survive and possibly to spread to other people.

So far, the concerning coronavirus strains have appeared in individuals who have not been vaccinated. But this evolution can happen in vaccinated people, as well.

Paul Bieniasz, a Howard Hughes investigator at the Rockefeller University, is particularly concerned this could happen between the time of an initial vaccination and a second shot to maximize the immune response.

"They might serve as a sort of a breeding ground for the virus to acquire new mutations," he says.

This issue is part of a debate over the best timing of vaccine doses. Some scientists have argued that it would be better to use the scarce vaccines to give first doses to as many people as possible, so the maximum number of people have at least partial immunity. That could help slow the spread of the virus.

Bieniasz worries that would also hasten the evolution of new strains of virus.

Scientists simply don't know how this will play out. For one thing, it's unclear whether the first shot of a vaccine is strong enough to prevent the virus from multiplying inside someone and being abundant enough to spread to somebody else. If the virus can't spread, how it has evolved in an individual becomes irrelevant.

It's clear that the vaccines reduce the risk of illness and death, but it's not known to what extent they prevent the virus from infecting an individual, or spreading from one person to another. Does this happen after the first dose? The second?

"There are really too many unknowns to really be definitive and positive about what the best way forward is, what the most effective way to use the available vaccine doses is," Bieniasz says.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious disease specialist, says the vaccines used in the United States are 95% effective when used as intended, and there simply are no data supporting any other approach.

Fauci also says that a fully vaccinated person is apparently better able to fend off virus variants, so it makes sense to get people the maximum protection as quickly as possible.

The flip side, though, is that the virus including mutant strains can spread through the population faster if fewer people are vaccinated.

Extending the time between the first and second dose of a vaccine "does run the risk of promoting evolution," says Andrew Read, an evolutionary microbiologist at Penn State University. But he adds, "I must say, at the moment, that seems like a second-order issue compared to just reducing the transmission through the population as a whole."

When it comes to new vaccine-induced variants, "I know everybody's worried about it," he says, but history shows that viruses that have mutated generally don't render a vaccine useless. "It's often got strong anti-disease properties, so you get less sick," he says.

And even a fully vaccinated person can still play host to an evolving virus, in situations where the vaccine prevents illness but still allows a virus to replicate. That appears to happen even with the most effective COVID-19 vaccines. So, viral evolution doesn't just occur in the time between shots.

"I think there are a lot of options here for dealing with evolution, should it occur," Read says. For example, it helps that there are already more than half a dozen COVID-19 vaccines in use globally, and many others in development.

"One of the great things about having a lot of vaccine options is we might end up with a population which is heterogeneously vaccinated," Read says. Different people will have different vaccines, each stimulating a different immune response. "That will really help hinder the spread of mutants that are good at [diminishing] any one of those."

Also, a virus that has picked up a trait to evade one person's immune system will encounter a different set of defenses in the next individual. "If you and I have a different response, that really helps," Read says, "because anything that gets out of me might be killed by you."

Drugmakers are also keeping a close eye on mutants, and are already formulating new vaccines that would be more effective, if it turns out the original vaccines lose too much potency with the new variants.

So, this isn't a crisis.

"We're not going to fall off a cliff tomorrow in terms of vaccine efficacy," says Bieniasz at Rockefeller. "What we're likely to see is a slow, steady erosion of efficacy over perhaps quite a long period of time."

To slow this evolutionary process as much as possible, he says, the best strategy is to slow the spread of the virus right now, using masks and social distancing, so people who get vaccinated are at lower risk for getting infected in the first place.

You can contact NPR Science Correspondent Richard Harris at rharris@npr.org.

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COVID-19 Vaccines And Coronavirus Mutations : Shots - Health News - NPR

If given the choice between chilling on a couch or going for a run, most of us would gleefully pick the couch. It turns out, that's an evolutionary reaction.

The desire to reduce our caloric output is a natural response to needing to conserve energy, says Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolution and biology at Harvard University, and the author of Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding.

"When it used to be sort of required, spending extra energy doing physical activity was a bad idea," Lieberman explained in an interview withThe Current's Matt Galloway.

Here's part of their conversation.

How could humans not have evolved to exercise?

Well, that seems to be a head turner for a lot of folks. It's a basic distinction between physical activity and exercise. So physical activity is just moving, right? It's just getting up and doing stuff, like I just shoveled the driveway this morning. That's physical activity.

But exercise is a special kind of physical activity. It's discretionary, it's voluntary, it's when we do physical activity for the sake of health and fitness. And so when I go for a run today, that's exercise.

In the past, people had to be very physically active, right? They had to be physically active to survive. They had to get food. They had to avoid being somebody else's food. And today we've created this world where we no longer have to be physically active. And so we now have to choose it.

There are people in the book that you refer to as exercists. Who are the exercists amongst us?

Yeah, so we all know exercists. They're that kind of annoying people who nag and brag about exercise, you know, tell you how many pounds they lifted to the gym. They just kind of make us feel bad about whatever it is that we do.

What is wrong with those people and what is wrong in terms of what they do with how then we end up thinking about exercise.

That's the reason I entitled the book Exercised.We get exercised about exercise. We get anxious and confused and sort of nervous.

The biggest reason that people get nervous is that they're made to feel that they're lazy, that somehow there's something wrong with them if they don't run marathons or they don't go to the gym and lift huge numbers of weights or whatever.

The example I love to use is in a mall or an airport or something like that and yet there's an escalator next to a stairway, right? And there's that little voice in your head which says, take the escalator, right? And even though there were no escalators in the Stone Age, obviously, it's still a basic, fundamental and sensible instinct to avoid unnecessary physical activity.

There's been a lot of research done on exercise. What is it that concerns you about how that research in past has been conducted, particularly when it comes to physical activity, what we need from physical activity?

It's not so much the research that concerns me. I think it's the way that we've packaged it and conveyed it. You know, we pick up the newspaper or click on a website and you read an article [saying]wearthis kind of shoe;two days later, you read a completely opposite article [that says to] weara different kind of shoe.Or you read that you should do this amount of weight. We get this information, these little sound bites that are often contradictory.

And then the other thing is that we've kind of medicalized and commercialized how we think about physical activity. I don't know the data in Canada, but in the United States, only about 20 percent of Americans get the minimum level of physical activity that's recommended by every major health organization on the planet, which is 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity a week.

And I think that an evolutionary approach and an anthropological approach can help us do a lot better in a more compassionate way.

What have you learned in that research about physical activity that perhaps we could learn here?Just in part, around the idea that we've evolved in some ways to be as inactive as possible.

I mean, there's several ways to answer your question. So, one is that we have the sense that our ancestors used to be active all the time. That our ancestors wereincredible athletes who could just get up in the morning and run marathons and, you know, worked tirelessly all day long. And the answer is, sure, they worked harder than your average American or Canadian, but they didn't work that hard.

Typical hunter gatherers spent about two and a quarter hours every day doing moderate to vigorous physical activity. That's not a huge amount.

So we've kind of got this kind of bizarre notion about sort of physical inactivity. We think that, you know, we rush out and buy standing desks and kind of think that that's like exercise, which isn't right. And we demonize chairs.

What about walking? You talk in the book about why it is that humans are efficient walkers.

If there's any one physical activity that we evolved to do, it's walking. We are champion walkers, right? And your average hunter-gatherer walks, you know, between five to nine miles a day, which is extraordinary. That's like walking from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., every year.

And we have all kinds of beautiful, elegant adaptations in our body that make us really good at it. And that's actually one of the reasons why it's hard to lose a lot of weight through walking because you just don't spend that much energy walking. A typical person walking a mile burns about 50 extra calories, which is not a lot.

But walking just turns on so many aspects of our cellular biology thathave all kinds of incredible benefits in terms of our immune systems, our cardiovascular systems, our everysystem of your body. And it's one of the reasons why walking is so unbelievably healthy.

And yet one of the chapters, I mean, there are a number of myths that you kind of tackle head on in the book. One of the chapters is titled "The Importance of Being Lazy."Why is it important to be lazy?

From an evolutionary perspective, until recently, energy was limited. People struggled to get enough calories to get through the day and pay for themselves and their children's bodies, right. And when and when energy is limited, every time you spend energy on one thing, you're not spending on something else. You have to engage in trade offs, right?

Yesterday, I went for about a five mile run, and that meant I spent about 500 calories. Now, if I were energy limited, those would be calories that I couldn't spend on taking care of my body, orif I was a nursing mother, energy that I would use to to synthesize milk, which is really expensive. Nursing is really calorically expensive.

Taking it easy when you didn't have to exert yourself was an adaptation. It's useful. It's good. But now, of course, we have this very strange modern world where we no longer have to be active at all. And now we have to do the reverse, we have to choose to be active and we never evolved to do that.

Written by Lito Howse. Produced by Rachel Levy-McLaughlin.This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.

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Humans have not evolved to exercise, says Harvard prof - CBC.ca

Details of duo of flaws in management portal made public weeks after fix

A severe unauthenticated SQL injection vulnerability has been patched by developers of the Evolution CMS.

Evolution is a PHP-based, open source content management system (CMS) used to manage the backend of websites.

On February 8, cybersecurity firm Synactiv publicly revealed the existence of two security flaws in the CMS and how a blocked account can be exploited to perform an unauthenticated SQLi in Evolution CMS using the header.

Written by Synacktivs Nicolas Biscos and Thomas Etrillard, the security advisory (PDF) details an unauthenticated SQL injection vulnerability on the Evolution manager login page.

Read more of the latest infosec research from around the world

This security flaw was caused by how the application processes SQL queries. If a user was to send crafted data, the query could be modified before landing in an Evolution database.

As the CMS logs actions in the manager interface and inserts data into a database, the IP field is not scrubbed properly, and so the header can be tampered with.

When an account in the manager interface is blocked, a particular function is called upon which can be exploited by an attacker without authentication to extract SQL database records.

A threat actor could also choose to trigger an account block, if they so choose, by issuing invalid login attempts.

The second bug found by Synactiv also stemmed from bugs in the management interface. In order to find out if an account exists, attackers can take advantage of behavioral changes during the authentication phase.

According to the researchers, you can determine the presence of a user based on the applications response time, and if an account does not exist, the full authentication process does not take place.

Combining the knowledge of an existing account, and blocking it on purpose, can then be used to trigger the SQL injection flaw.

Synacktiv told The Daily Swig that the time-based enumeration vulnerability is not very common, as this kind of bug depends on time and on the way the server handles it.

SECURITY DEEP DIVES Software supply chain attacks everything you need to know

The security issues have been fixed in Evolution versions 1.4.12, 2.0.4, and in 3.0.

The researchers submitted their findings to Evolution on December 21. The developer responded quickly and issued a fix on the same day.

Synacktiv said that the vendors choice to go public with details of the flaw weeks after its discovery was to give time to people to fix (and time for us to publish).

Evolution CEO Dmytro Lukianenko thanked the researchers for their findings and has urged all users to update their software.

RELATED WordPress 5.6 lands with new auto-update UI, Site Health enhancements

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Blocked accounts abused in Evolution CMS SQL injection attacks - The Daily Swig

It suggested that Homo sapiens were in China at least 20,000 years earlier than early modern humans had been previously believed to have left Africa and spread around the world. It also tantalizingly hinted at the possibility that a different group of early humans could have evolved separately in Asia.

Not so fast, says the science in 2021. New research published Monday has suggested perhaps we shouldn't be so eager to rewrite the time line on human origins.

DNA analysis of two human teeth found in the same cave, called Fuyan, plus teeth and other fossilized remains from four other caves in the same region, suggested that it was unlikely early modern humans were in China so early.

"Our new research means it is very unlikely that Homo sapiens reached China before 50,000 years ago. It is always possible that our species reached the region more than 100,000 years ago, but we would have to say that there is no convincing evidence in favor of this at present," said Darren Curnoe, an associate professor at the Australian Museum Research Institute in Sydney and coauthor of the paper that published in the journal PNAS on Monday.

The researchers were able to extract DNA from 10 human teeth and establish the age of other materials in the caves, such as charcoal and animal teeth, using a range of different methods. The team found that the teeth were at least 16,000 years old, while the other materials were less than 40,000 years old.

"The 2015 study relied heavily on the results of a single dating method which determined the age of cave materials (flowstone) lying above and below the sediments containing the human teeth," he said via email. Flowstone is a sheetlike deposit of rock formed by flowing water.

"It is well understood that the most reliable dates come directly from the materials of interest to archaeologists, in this case, the human teeth. Our new (dates), including direct ages, are far younger than previously suggested."

The 2015 study measured the radioactive decay of uranium within cave deposits, not DNA.

Chris Stringer, research leader for human evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, said that the dates of Chinese fossilized teeth had always stood out and it was right to investigate them further using different methods.

However, he said the study, while interesting, didn't definitively rule out early modern humans in China before 50,000 years ago.

Complex family tree

Untangling human ancestry is a complicated business, and recent research has indicated the human family tree is much more bushy and less linear than the traditional "Out of Africa" narrative, which suggested modern humans originated in Africa and made their first successful migration to the rest of the world in a single wave between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago.

Many different ancient hominins existed and coexisted before Homo sapiens emerged as the lone survivor, and there was interbreeding between different groups of early humans.

Some of these groups -- like Neanderthals -- are easily identified through the fossil record and archaeological remains, but others -- like the Denisovans -- have been largely identified by their genetic legacy.

Maria Martinn-Torres, director of the National Research Center on Human Evolution in Spain and an author of the 2015 study, said she welcomed the new data on the early presence of modern humans in China.

However, she noted that the two teeth from Fuyan Cave were uncovered in 2019 and didn't belong to the original sample her team studied and published in 2015.

"The precise data about the location and morphology of the sample is crucial, but it is not provided in the paper," she said.

"I agree that we should be working in improving the dates of all sites of interest, especially with direct dating when possible. However, at the moment, there is an increasing number of samples that would support the presence of H. sapiens outside Africa before 50 ka (50,000 years ago)," she said via email.

She noted that there are other discoveries in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Sumatra and Laos, and another site in China where a jawbone has been found, that support the presence of Homo sapiens outside Africa before 50,000 years ago.

One of the main factors supporting the idea that early modern humans left Africa around 50,000 years ago is that there is a strong signal in the genes of present-day human populations.

"We would say that Out of Africa after 70,000 years ago seems to be the dominant picture. We can't preclude earlier dispersals in other regions, but certainly southern China seems to have been settled in this Out of Africa wave after 50,000 years ago," Curnoe said via email.

However, Martinn-Torres said this doesn't rule out the possibility that earlier groups of Homo sapiens wandered around Asia earlier -- just as groups of other early humans like Neanderthals and Denisovans did.

"We had no expectations about the dating of these fossils and sites and would have been pleased if we had confirmed an early dispersal. It would certainly have made the history of our species much older than generally believed, and perhaps more interesting," Curnoe said.

"Sadly, this seems not to be the case, at the least for southern China, according to our work."

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Story of human evolution gets another rewrite with DNA analysis of Chinese teeth - CNN

In recent weeks there has been much talk about the governments Central Vista Redevelopment Project with the Supreme Court having cleared the final roadblocks.

The main elements of this project include the construction of a new Parliament building near the original one with increased seating capacity; replacing the North and South Blocks with a common secretariat to accommodate all central ministries; revamping the 3km Rajpath stretch between Rashtrapati Bhavan and India Gate; and repurposing older structures into museums, meeting halls and public-use areas such as cafes and restaurants.

Like most other matters, this project too has camps on both sides of the Masonic compass, an object that symbolises the inspirational roots of Edwin Lutyens. There are those who think that it is about time that we upgraded executive and legislative infrastructure and evolved with the times. On the other hand, there are those who decry the project as fixing what isnt broken and being wasteful. They also believe that it is insensitive to history.

But lets step back from the controversy for a moment to put the architecture of Lutyens Delhi in perspective. New Delhi is often compared to Paris and Washington DC, possibly owing to the similarities between New Delhis Central Vista, the National Mall in Washington DC and the Champs-lyses in Paris. But dig a little deeper into history and you would find that both these cities made substantial architectural changes to their arterial avenues to suit the times.

Washington DC was designed in 1791 by French engineer, Pierre LEnfant. He envisaged a grand avenue like the Champs-lyses that would be lined with trees and gardens and stretch across 1.6km between Congress House (now the US Capitol) and a statue of George Washington. But before LEnfant could implement his plan fully, Washington sacked him.

By the end of the 1800s, unplanned growth ensured that the National Mall became an odd mixture of public and industrial buildings, gardens, unkempt trees, and even the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station. This state of affairs continued until 1902 when a commission headed by senator James McMillan drew up a new plan for the Mall, albeit keeping LEnfants stated vision in mind.

The McMillan Plan doubled the size of the National Mall. It absorbed landfill areas that would accommodate the future Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. The Washington Monument had originally denoted the western boundary of the Mall but it now became the very centre of it. Then the trees that covered the area between the Capitol and the Washington Monument were removed in the 1930s.

Even if you consider the Capitol building, it underwent many changes. It was completed in 1800, burnt down in 1814, and restored in 1819. But just 30 years later the building could no longer accommodate the rapidly increasing number of legislators from new member states. So the building was enlarged with the addition of a gigantic new dome. Two new wings were added that incorporated new chambers for the House of Representatives and the Senate. These additions more than doubled the length of the Capitol. The Capitol no longer resembled its parent.

Now let us turn to Paris, the other great city that New Delhi is compared to. The Avenue des Champs lyses runs 1.9km between the Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe and almost defines Paris. But before the reign of Louis XIV, the area consisted of fields, swamps and kitchen gardens. In 1667, Andr Le Ntre was commissioned to lay out the Champs-lyses and its gardens as an extension of the Tuileries Garden. Le Ntre created a wide promenade between the palace and the present Rond Point lined with elm trees and flowerbeds.

By 1724, the avenue was extended, now leading beyond the Place de lEtoile. During the 18th century, stately mansions and buildings were built along the avenue. The lyse Palace, now the official home of the President of France, was built close by. From 1828 onwards sidewalks, gas lighting, pubs, cafes, restaurants, concert halls and theatres began to appear. In 1836, the Arc de Triomphe, commissioned by Napoleon, was completed towards the western end.

In 1855, a giant exhibition hall called the Palais de lIndustrie was constructed along the Champs-lyses. Spread over 30,000sqm, it was built to host the Exposition Universelle. Then this was knocked down to create the Grand Palais, a structure that is very different from the rest of the buildings in the area because of its glass, steel and reinforced concrete. Todays Champs-lyses is a commercial avenue lined by shops and cafes, completely alien to the stately residential area that it once was in the 18th century. And the mayor of Paris has now announced a 250 million makeover.

In fact, many of the greatest landmarks of Paris would never have been built if Parisians had voted for architectural continuity. A petition against the Eiffel Tower in 1887 said, Imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack. The Pyramide du Louvre was called an architectural joke, an eyesore, an anachronistic intrusion of Egyptian death symbolism in the middle of Paris, and a megalomaniacal folly.

We must accordingly see the Central Vista project as an earnest effort to modernise government infrastructure; to enhance legislative capacity; to create public use spaces such as museums and restaurants; and to evolve as all great cities must. And yes, argument and debate is part of that great process of evolution.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

END OF ARTICLE

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Evolution is always noisy: And upgrades are always needed in the great cities Paris, Washington, New Delhi - The Times of India Blog

LONDON, Feb. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- ClarivatePlc(NYSE:CLVT), a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, today released a report that examines the organization of information in the global scientific community and introduces a flexible new data-driven approach to citation-based classification. The report showcases new technology, developed in collaborationwith the leading academic scientometrics team at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Entitled "Data categorization: understanding choices and outcomes", the report from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) outlines existing research categorical systems from around the world and the analytical consequences of applying them to national and institutional data. It introduces a new and highly innovative approach to data aggregation based on trusted research data in the Web of Science citation network. It also promotes the need for good practice in data management to improve knowledge, competency and confidence and to ensure the responsible use of research metrics.

The team's research found that a categorization scheme informed by article metadata is stronger than one arranged by human concepts, e.g., those which are journal-based, top-down and use expert input to split domains into related sub-categories. Instead, a citation-based classification of articles and reviews progressively links individual elements into larger units with shared characteristics based on features in the underlying data. This innovative approach demonstrated in InCites Citation Topics more accurately represents microclusters, or specialties, provides more uniform content and improves citation normalization. It also gives opportunity for novel groups to appear that were not previously possible with journal-based schemes.

Apart from its wide range of data selections, tests and visualizations, InCites provides multiple choices of top-down data classifications and now also offers Citation Topics as a bottom-up citation-based classification. The current implementation of Citation Topics is composed of 10 macro topics, 326 meso topics and 2,444 micro topics, with monthly and annual updating built in which will allow it to evolve over time.

Jonathan Adams, Chief Scientist at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate and a co-author of the report said: "There are clear strengths and weaknesses of the variety of classification systems currently available, and our aim in introducing Citation Topics is to promote good practice in data management as part of the responsible use of research metrics."

Ludo Waltman, Deputy Director at CWTS, Leiden University said: "Bottom-up citation-based classifications play a prominent role in many of the scientometric analyses that we carry out at CWTS. It is great to see that InCites users will now also be able to benefit from these powerful classifications."

Joel Haspel, SVP Strategy, Science at Clarivate said: "This new report highlights the evolving nature of data categorization. It addresses the way we recognize natural divisions of knowledge and research and how we categorize publications for discovery, analysis, management and policy.Being aware of the characteristics and limitations of the ways we categorize research publications is important to research management because it influences the way we think about established and innovative research topics, the way we analyze research activity and performance, and even the way we set up organizations to do research."

Notes for editors:

About ClarivateClarivate is a global leader in providing solutions to accelerate the lifecycle of innovation. Our bold mission is to help customers solve some of the world's most complex problems by providing actionable information and insights that reduce the time from new ideas to life-changing inventions in the areas of science and intellectual property. We help customers discover, protect and commercialize their inventions using our trusted subscription and technology-based solutions coupled with deep domain expertise. For more information, please visitclarivate.com.

Media ContactRebecca Krahenbuhl[emailprotected]

SOURCE Clarivate Plc

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Clarivate Report Highlights Importance of Evolution in Data Categorization to Promote Responsible Research Metrics - PRNewswire

While much changed in 2020, it was largely business as usual for Great Outdoors Colorado, the lottery-funded arm pumping millions of dollars into parks and open spaces and conservation.

With $77.8 million invested across 101 projects in 34 counties, 2020 marked the 19th consecutive year the program born in 1992 met its constitutionally mandated cap, read a recent end-of-year report. (That cap is annually adjusted for inflation; it's set for $71.7 million for fiscal year 2021).

"Looking at the numbers, you might think 2019-2020 was a year like any other for Great Outdoors Colorado," executive director Chris Castilian wrote in the report.

Yet he considered the period GOCO's "most introspective and forward-looking work in years."

A 16-month strategic planning process "resulted in an evolution in our role as a funder," Castilian explained.

Before the pandemic hit and was followed by a racial justice awakening, GOCO had committed to a future with equity at the center. Grant-giving was restructured to better account for communities ill-equipped with matching capabilities. And by deciding to set aside certain sums of lottery revenues, GOCO set a course for more large-scale "legacy" projects "more projects with lasting benefits for future generations," Castilian wrote.

"[W]e couldn't have anticipated that our flexibility and community-centered approach would be tested so soon," he remarked.

The year saw GOCO establish the Resilient Communities grant program, dedicated to fill pandemic-caused shortfalls. An example was the $316,100 given to Colorado Springs' parks department to keep the Prospect Lake Beach House project on track. Another was the $456,646 awarded to the city and county of Denver to develop a youth-focused stewardship program at local parks.

GOCO's report mentioned high-profile, multi-year funded projects that reached milestones in 2020. They included Trinidad's Fishers Peak State Park, which opened a small portion for visitation in the fall. Sandstone Ranch, what Douglas County open space managers call their "crown jewel," also opened last year. And the report saluted the Palisade Plunge, a long-dreamed mountain bike trail on the Grand Mesa that completed construction before winter.

GOCO finished 2020 by announcing $1.3 million for the local grassroots mission to acquire a 10-acre peninsula on Lake San Cristobal in Lake City. Also in December, GOCO closed another $1 million project dedicated to Pitkin County in preserving Sunfire Ranch, described as "the largest ranch that remained unprotected in the Crystal Valley" and filling the gap in public land making up the 221,000-acre Thompson Divide.

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Great Outdoors Colorado celebrates 'evolution' year with high-profile projects realized - Colorado Springs Gazette

Geoscientists have released a video that for the first time shows the uninterrupted movement of the Earths tectonic plates over the past billion years.

The international effort provides a scientific framework for understanding planetary habitability and for finding critical metal resources needed for a low-carbon future.

It reveals a planet in constant movement as land masses move around the Earths surface, for instance showing that Antarctica was once at the equator.

The video is based on new research published in the March 2021 edition of Earth-Science Reviews.

Video showing the movement of Earths tectonic plates over the past billion years. Credit: Dr. Andrew Merdith/University of Lyon

Co-author and academic leader of the University of Sydney EarthByte geosciences group, Professor Dietmar Mller, said: Our team has created an entirely new model of Earth evolution over the last billion years.

Professor Dietmar Mller from the EarthByte group in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. Credit: Britta Campion

Our planet is unique in the way that it hosts life. But this is only possible because geological processes, like plate tectonics, provide a planetary life-support system.

Lead author and creator of the video Dr. Andrew Merdith began work on the project while a PhD student with Professor Mller in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. He is now based at the University of Lyon in France.

Co-author, Dr. Michael Tetley, who also completed his PhD at the University of Sydney, told Euronews: For the first time a complete model of tectonics has been built, including all the boundaries

On a human timescale, things move in centimeters per year, but as we can see from the animation, the continents have been everywhere in time. A place like Antarctica that we see as a cold, icy inhospitable place today, actually was once quite a nice holiday destination at the equator.

Co-author Dr. Sabin Zahirovic from the University of Sydney, said: Planet Earth is incredibly dynamic, with the surface composed of plates that constantly jostle each other in a way unique among the known rocky planets. These plates move at the speed fingernails grow, but when a billion years is condensed into 40 seconds a mesmerizing dance is revealed.

Oceans open and close, continents disperse and periodically recombine to form immense supercontinents.

Earth scientists from every continent have collected and published data, often from inaccessible and remote regions, that Dr. Andrew Merdith and his collaborators have assimilated over the past four years to produce this billion-year model.

It will allow scientists to better understand how the interior of the Earth convects, chemically mixes and loses heat via seafloor spreading and volcanism. The model will help scientists understand how climate has changed, how ocean currents altered and how nutrients fluxed from the deep Earth to stimulate biological evolution.

Professor Mller said: Simply put, this complete model will help explain how our home, Planet Earth, became habitable for complex creatures. Life on Earth would not exist without plate tectonics. With this new model, we are closer to understanding how this beautiful blue planet became our cradle.

Reference: Extending full-plate tectonic models into deep time: Linking the Neoproterozoic and the Phanerozoic by Andrew S. Merdith, Simon E. Williams, Alan S. Collins, Michael G. Tetley, Jacob A. Mulder, Morgan L. Blades, Alexander Young, Sheree E. Armistead, John Cannon, Sabin Zahirovic and R. Dietmar Mller, 24 December 2020, Earth-Science Reviews.DOI: 10.1016/j.earscirev.2020.103477

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A Billion Years in 40 Seconds: Mesmerizing Video Reveals the Evolution Our Dynamic Planet - SciTechDaily