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SCIENCE

DNAdots Biology educators and students, as well as those curious to learn more about genetics, may want to check out DNAdots, a free educational resource created by the team at miniPCR bio. DNAdots offers its visitors “bite-sized, simple explanations of modern genetic technologies,” making them excellent ways to gain a better understanding of topics such as personal genetic ancestry testing, DNA barcoding, and gene drives.

Not-for-profit publisher makes big move toward open access science. “Canadian Science Publishing (CSP)–a not-for-profit publisher of peer-reviewed STEM journals–is excited to announce a new transformative open access publishing agreement with the University of California (UC) that will offer unlimited open access publication for UC researchers publishing with its journals.

Genetics Unzipped in honor of International Women’s Day earlier this week, readers will want to check out the March 2019 episode, “Not just the wife,” which celebrates four incredible women scientists. Genetics Unzipped is a wonderful resource for science podcast fans. Dr. Kat Arney hosts the show, and her skills as an award-winning science writer shine as she “unzips” complex genetics topics for listeners outside of the field.

Personal Genetics Education Project
The Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School launched pgEd in 2006, largely in response to the expanding role of genetics in all aspects of society. The pgEd team empowers people with genetics knowledge so that they can make informed decisions in whatever ways the field affects them.

Black in Genetics
Black in Genetics is on a mission to disseminate scientific knowledge and dismantle racism within the field. The organization connects Black geneticists to employers and resources and also provides a space for conversation on advancing equity.

G3
G3 covers three important, and interrelated, topics: genes, genomes, and genetics. A project of the Genetics Society of America, the journal publishes open-access scholarship under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Teaching Genetics with Dragons
Forget boring Punnett square diagrams and embrace the challenge of distilling complex genetics content into understandable and enjoyable lessons with some help from Teaching Genetics with Dragons. Readers can add some fire to genetics lessons with this platform that uses mythical creatures as a launching point for scientific discovery. Though dragons and genetics may not be an obvious pair, these games prove that creativity is boundless. Three games are available: Geniventure, Geniverse, and Genigames.

Lawmakers want to empower publishers to collectively negotiate with Facebook. “On the heels of a heated standoff between platforms and publishers in Australia, U.S. lawmakers reintroduced a piece of legislation that would allow the news industry to collectively negotiate content deals with tech companies.”

Facebook wants court to dismiss antitrust lawsuits. “Facebook is pushing back against antitrust lawsuits filed by the US Federal Trade Commission and 48 state attorneys general, alleging they failed to show that the social media giant illegally stifled competition and harmed consumers.”

Apple’s new privacy-label database lets you see what data its apps gather on you. “Apps are everywhere, and pretty much all of them gather data about us whenever we use them. In light of that, Apple in December began requiring app developers to list information about the data their apps gather, in an accessible privacy label. Now the company is taking things one step further, with an easily searchable database of privacy labels for Apple’s own apps.”

TIP: Microsoft is ending support for the old non-Chromium Edge. “Support for Microsoft’s Edge browser is ending today — not the new Chromium-based one, but the original Edge that was built as a replacement for Internet Explorer 11. Microsoft now calls it Legacy Edge, and the company announced it would be discontinuing the product back in August. That day has finally come: Legacy Edge will no longer receive security updates, and anyone still using it should start the process of switching to something else.”

Flaws in Apple Location Tracking System Could Lead to User Identification. “Vulnerabilities identified in offline finding (OF) — Apple’s proprietary crowd-sourced location tracking system — could be abused for user identification, researchers said in a report released this month. Introduced in 2019, the system relies on the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology for the detection of ‘lost’ devices, and on the Internet connection of so-called ‘finder’ devices to report on their location back to the owner.”

University at Buffalo computer scientists have developed a tool that automatically identifies deepfake photos by analyzing light reflections in the eyes. “The two eyes should have very similar reflective patterns because they’re seeing the same thing. It’s something that we typically don’t typically notice when we look at a face,” says Lyu, a multimedia and digital forensics expert who has testified before Congress.
The paper, “Exposing GAN-Generated Faces Using Inconsistent Corneal Specular HighlightsDownload pdf,” is available on the open access repository arXiv.