As white blood cells die, they send out signals to fellow leukocytes nearby — possibly to alert them that they’ve been attacked by a pathogen, and are in the throes of death. Using time-lapse microscopy, scientists at La Trobe University were able to film this process for the first time.
Artificial trans fat will be banned from the US food supply over the next three years under a ruling by regulators that the products pose health risks that contribute to heart disease, the leading killer of Americans.
Today at Sony’s E3 2015 press conference the company announced that it will unbundle its Vue streaming channels and offer the stations a le carte. In doing so, Sony becomes the first provider to offer (at least some) TV stations to the American consumer without bundles.
Every election seems to crystallize around a theme. It’s early yet, but could the theme of 2016 be mononymy? That’s the formal term for the use of a single name, and it’s unusually popular with this year’s presidential hopefuls, with three leading contenders branding themselves sans surnames.
He was 12 years old. He was a slave. He’d had no schooling. He was too young, too unlettered, too un-European; he couldn’t have done this on his own. That’s what people said.
The BBC is reporting 75-year-old Sir John Hurt, actor of stage and screen, has pancreatic cancer.
“I have always been open about the way in which I conduct my life and in that spirit I would like to make a statement. I have recently been diagnosed with early stage pancreatic cancer,” Hurt told the Press Association. “I am undergoing treatment and am more than optimistic about a satisfactory outcome, as indeed is the medical team.”
But the actor, who fans recently saw in Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary and who is set fir 2016’s Tarzan, is still dedicated to his craft.
He also said in his statement, “I am continuing to focus on my professional commitments and will shortly be recording ‘Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell’ (one of life’s small ironies!) for BBC Radio 4.”
The staff (and I’m sure the readers) of The Mary Sue wish you well, Sir Hurt.
A promising high school student’s life cut short—killed in a crime that’s horrified the city. Now police say they’ve tracked down the two men who sexually assaulted and strangled 16-year-old Arnesha Bowers and then lit her home on fire.
Investigators say 16-year-old Arnesha Bowers knew her attackers and they used her cell phone records to track them down.
Inside a burning home, investigators found the body of 16-year-old Arnesha Bowers — bound, sexually assaulted and strangled.
“I can only imagine what the last moments of Arnesha’s life were like. It had to have been pure hell,” said Major Stanley Brandford, Baltimore Police Department. Now police say these are the two Blood Gang members who killed the teen — 23-year-old Adonay Dixon and 20-year-old John Childs.
According to court documents, Childs and Dixon were hanging out with the teen at a party when they followed her home and plotted a burglary. Investigators say Childs and Dixon broke into the home through a basement window, but were soon discovered by Bowers.
Childs told police while he ransacked the house for money, Dixon dragged the teen into the basement. Detectives say she was strangled with an electrical cord before the house went up in flames.
Childs and Dixon are now behind bard and face multiple charges, including first-degree murder.
SAY HER NAME : #ArneshaBowers
#BlackWomensLivesMatter
#BlackGIRLSLivesMatter let us remember she was 16, a baby. Let Black youth have their youth.
If you’ve been on the internet in the past few days, chances are you may have seen the new “text walking” lanes installed in Antwerp. But so has Antwerp’s mayor, and he is not happy.
Initial reports mentioned that officials in Belgium’s most populous city were interested in expanding the new lanes, which were supposedly meant for people to walk in while looking at their phone screens. In an email to Quartz, the mayor’s press secretary made it quite clear that nothing could be further from the truth. “To be frank: we are not at all interested in expanding these lanes,” Johan Vermant wrote. Vermant went on to explain numerous ways in which “the company that wished to get publicity with this stunt” had violated both municipal and federal laws.
That company, a mobile phone store chain called Mlab, claimed that the purpose of the new lanes was to improve pedestrian safety. “You probably walk through the streets while texting or sending Whatsapp messages to your friends and don’t really pay attention to your surroundings,” Mlab’s marketing director David Verbeyst said. “This causes collisions with poles or other pedestrians. You could, unknowingly, even be endangering your own life while you ‘textwalk’ when you cross the street without looking up.”
But Vermant said that the lanes had the opposite effect. “Spraying alternative lines on a street as to make people believe it has an official character, can be very confusing and even lead to accidents,” he wrote. According to Vermant, not only did Mlab not ask for permission to spray-paint the streets—itself “a form of graffiti which is strictly forbidden in our city”—but also lied to police who came to investigate.
The managing director of Mlab’s advertising campaign, Bart Verschueren, admitted that the text-walking lanes were a gimmick. But, he said, “it shows that Mlab is constantly looking for opportunities, serious ones as well as entertaining ones, to help and guide people in the world of smartphones.”
Entertaining as the opportunity may have been, it will also prove costly for Mlab. Vermant told Quartz that the city of Antwerp has removed the lanes and charged Mlab for the removal costs, as well as fining it for breaking the law.
'Witnesses in Asbury Park, New Jersey said on Tuesday that they saw an off-duty officer shoot his estranged wife while at least one other officer looked on and did nothing.
Asbury Park Police Officer Michael Casey confirmed to the Asbury Park Press that an officer was involved in an incident where a woman was shot, but declined to give further details. Law enforcement sources and neighbors named Philip Seidle as the officer.
The woman was said to be his recently-divorced wife.'
In hopes of keeping young people content in the small town of Folkestone, England, billionaire Roger De Haan has commissioned construction of a local skateboarding park. It’s not the kind of building you’d expect to find in an old town on the English Channel.
According to recently unveiled design plans, this will be a futuristic, over-the-top building, featuring the world’s first multi-story skatepark. Guy Hollaway, the architect behind the project, told Dezeen magazine that the park’s installation is supposed to prevent “brain drain” as many of the area’s youth move elsewhere:
“If you make childhood meaningful through education, sport, recreation then it’s more likely that they’ll invest in their town and the future and stay and maybe bring up their own children in that town – that is what true regeneration is about.”
If and when the project is completed, skaters (of many types) and other “urban sports” aficionados will be able to zoom around a giant bowl on the top floor of the building with a five-meter drop. The top floor will connect to the lower levels with a series of ramps and an elevator. Three lower levels full of curving concrete ramps, ledges, and moguls will be encased in a metal mesh for light and ventilation.
“It sounds dangerous doesn’t it?” Hollaway told Dezeen. “We’re shrouding our children in what feels like rubber to protect them all the time, but I think—as the world becomes safer—a controlled adrenaline facility is what people will demand.”
(Facebook/UrbanSportsFolkestone)
Hollaway’s website says the park, or “centre for urban sports,” will be used for skateboarding, rollerblading, BMX biking, and scootering. Local youth will have access under “heavily subsidised rates.”
There will also be a rock climbing wall, a café, and a first-aid office within the cavernous five-story building. It’s scheduled to be completed by 2017.
An anonymous reader writes: Algolia is a buzzword-compliant ("Hosted Search API that delivers instant and relevant results")
start-up that uses a lot of open-source software (including various strains of Linux) and a lot of solid-state disk, and as such sometimes runs into problems with each of these. Their blog this week features a fascinating look at troubles that they faced with ext4 filesystems mysteriously flipping to read-only mode: not such a good thing for machines processing a search index, not just dishing it out.
"The NGINX daemon serving all the HTTP(S) communication of our API was up and ready to serve the search queries but the indexing process crashed. Since the indexing process is guarded by supervise, crashing in a loop would have been understandable but a complete crash was not. As it turned out the filesystem was in a read-only mode. All right, let's assume it was a cosmic ray :) The filesystem got fixed, files were restored from another healthy server and everything looked fine again. The next day another server ended with filesystem in read-only, two hours after another one and then next hour another one. Something was going on. After restoring the filesystem and the files, it was time for serious analysis since this was not a one time thing.
The rest of the story explains how they isolated the problem and worked around it; it turns out that the culprit was TRIM, or rather TRIM's interaction with certain SSDs: "The system was issuing a TRIM to erase empty blocks, the command got misinterpreted by the drive and the controller erased blocks it was not supposed to. Therefore our files ended-up with 512 bytes of zeroes, files smaller than 512 bytes were completely zeroed. When we were lucky enough, the misbehaving TRIM hit the super-block of the filesystem and caused a corruption."
Since SSDs are becoming the norm outside the data center as well as within, some of the problems that their analysis exposed for one company probably would be good to test for elsewhere. One upshot: "As a result, we informed our server provider about the affected SSDs and they informed the manufacturer. Our new deployments were switched to different SSD drives and we don't recommend anyone to use any SSD that is anyhow mentioned in a bad way by the Linux kernel."
If you’re one of the 143 million people worldwide that watched the “Spider Dog” prank, then you’re at least a little familiar with SA Wardega, the Polish performance group that strapped that hairy costume on that little dog. The same group just scared the shit out of Chris Pratt while he was doing Jurassic World press in Poland, filling a TV studio hallway with hidden cameras before attacking him with two relatively life-sized Velociraptors. Pratt seems to have taken the whole thing relatively well, asking “How do you say ‘Fuck you’ in Polish,” before begrudgingly posing for pictures with the two dinos. Hopefully the world doesn’t pick up too much on this video, though, lest Pratt be subsequently terrorized everywhere he goes with insanely well-thought-out pranks.
There’s been a rush of online tributes to the great Christopher Lee since his death last week at the age of 93. Happily, however, Lee continued to work until the end of his life, meaning we can still look forward to new work from the iconic actor. Deadline reports that Extraordinary Tales, an animated anthology film based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe and featuring the voice work from Lee, will be released October 30. It’s being released by GKIDS, a production company that has earned six Oscar nominations in the past six years for its films, including last year’s superb Ernest & Celestine. Along with Lee, the new film features the voices of Julian Sands, Guillermo Del Toro, B-movie maven Roger Corman, and—interestingly—Bela Lugosi. (It’s from a radio recording the late actor performed of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”) It should provide the perfect ...
A friend just shared this on facebook, and I don’t know if this originated as a Tumblr edit (no tags with “Jeremy Brett” and “Dalek” together), but this completely wins the Internet for me today. Originator is welcome to pm me for proper crediting. Meanwhile, LOOK AT THIS AWESOME THING
With every new version of InDesign, features large and small are added. But occasionally features are removed as well. Anyone seen the Position Tool or the Navigator panel recently? I didn't think so. Another case in point: InDesign CC 2015 does not (yet?) support DPS—that's the old DPS, aka the Digital Publishing Suite. Don't believe […]
As she and/or her omnipresent, lip-possessing computer avatar hinted recently, Janet Jackson is about to go on tour. The singer, songwriter, and nascent record label owner has announced that she’ll soon be embarking on the Unbreakable World Tour, which will start this fall in support of her upcoming, as-yet-untitled 11th album. Dates for the first leg of the tour can be found below, with events kicking off on August 31 in Vancouver, BC. Jackson then plans to cover several other Canadian cities, including Edmonton and Calgary, before sweeping down into the U.S. like the world’s most danceable cold front.
Jackson last toured back in 2011, spending most of the year on the 80-show-long Number Ones, Up Close And Personal. Unbreakable looks to be of a similar length, with the first leg running 35 shows, including appearances in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami. Tickets will go on ...
An adorably cooperative cat named Gaigai wuwu uses his flat furry feet to effortlessly balance a variety of household items including a beer can, an egg, a toy car and even a hand of cards between his toes.
As many as 600 million Samsung phones may be vulnerable to attacks that allow hackers to surreptitiously monitor the camera and microphone, read incoming and outgoing text messages, and install malicious apps, a security researcher said.
The vulnerability is in the update mechanism for a Samsung-customized version of SwiftKey, available on the Samsung Galaxy S6, S5, and several other Galaxy models. When downloading updates, the Samsung devices don't encrypt the executable file, making it possible for attackers in a position to modify upstream traffic—such as those on the same Wi-Fi network—to replace the legitimate file with a malicious payload. The exploit was demonstrated Tuesday at the Blackhat security conference in London by Ryan Welton, a researcher with security firm NowSecure. A video of his exploit is here.
SamsungKeyboardExploit
Phones that come pre-installed with the Samsung IME keyboard, as the Samsung markets its customized version of SwiftKey, periodically query an authorized server to see if updates are available for the keyboard app or any language packs that accompany it. Attackers in a man-in-the-middle position can impersonate the server and send a response that includes a malicious payload that's injected into a language pack update. Because Samsung phones grant extraordinarily elevated privileges to the updates, the malicious payload is able to bypass protections built into Google's Android operating system that normally limit the access third-party apps have over the device.
When the wonky phrase “backward compatibility” spilled from the mouth of Xbox boss Phil Spencer at Microsoft’s E3 press conference this week, it worked like a magical incantation. Aside from the over-amplified sounds of virtual guns that fired during a few of the trailers, the loudest sound in Microsoft’s press conference on Monday was the thunderous cheer from thousands of attendees—faces glowing green from pulsating light-up Xbox necklaces—who had just learned they’d be able to play decade-old Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One.
It was an ironic moment considering that we’re at E3—gaming’s annual pow-wow devoted to the trailers, the teasers, the hints of what’s coming to a GameStop near you. Devoted to the future. Yet this full-throated roar celebrated the return to the past. Xbox’s pithy slogan right now is “jump ahead,” but perhaps it should have been ...
Most of us will never get to see a volcanic eruption in person, but thanks to these videos, we can not only see recent eruptions, we can journey into the mouths of volcanos without leaving the safety of our homes. You can almost feel the heat on your face.
In news designed to make American readers briefly splutter, “Huh?” before quickly losing interest again once comprehension sets in, the BBC has announced that Chris Evans will be the new host of Top Gear, its highly rated driving show. The Evans in question, though, isn’t the Captain America star—despite the fact that it would be pretty great if the show transitioned from driving challenges into 24/7 motorcycle hurling action—but the longtime BBC presenter. Evans currently hosts a morning radio program, The Chris Evans Breakfast Show, on BBC’s Radio 2, and co-presents BBC One’s The One Show on Fridays.
Evans will be at the head of a new line-up for the long-running car show, taking over in the wake of host Jeremy Clarkson’s departure. The BBC decided not to renew Clarkson’s contract earlier this year, in the wake of an alleged physical altercation ...
HARD as it may be to believe, Donald Trump’s announcement on June 16th that he is running for president as a Republican is the first time that the property tycoon and media bon vivant has launched an official campaign. Mr Trump has flirted with making a bid for the White House on several occasions in the past, notably in the 2012 election. At the time he strongly aligned himself with the “Birther” wing of the party, causing a stir by continually pushing the issue when even the most ardent doubters had accepted that, yes, Barack Obama was born in America. He decided not to join the race officially in May 2011, but said he still had a “strong conviction” that he could win the nomination. A poll in April 2011 showed him leading the Republican field. So what might we expect from a President Trump? We think the quotes speak for themselves.
The BBC is reporting 75-year-old Sir John Hurt, actor of stage and screen, has pancreatic cancer.
Super Opinionated.
