Month: July 2016

(credit: Philippe Put)

On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled (PDF) that Arkansas could not prohibit companies from making political robocalls to residences. The calls, he ruled, are protected by the First Amendment despite Arkansas’ Secretary of State arguing that forbidding such calls protect citizens’ privacy and safety.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the lawsuit was filed by a Virginia-based communications company called Conquest Communications, whose clients hired it to automatically call residents in Arkansas and ask them to participate in surveys that urge folks to vote. The robocalls also included “advocacy calls and a variety of other calls made in connection with political campaigns.”

Thirty-five years ago, Arkansas enacted a law that prohibited automatic pre-recorded voice calling for the purposes of “soliciting information, gathering data, or for any other purpose in connection with a political campaign…” as well as standard prohibitions on selling goods or services via robocall.

Female Aedes aegypti mosquito as she was in the process of obtaining a "blood meal" (credit: US Department of Health and Human Services)

The US Food and Drug Administration requested Wednesday that Florida’s Miami-Dade County and Broward County temporarily stop accepting blood donations after four people in the area inexplicably came down with Zika infections.

The four cases were not immediately explained by travel to an area experiencing an outbreak of the mosquito-borne virus, nor from sex with an infected person—the two main ways US residents become infected. This has led some health officials to speculate, though not confirm, that local mosquitoes may be transmitting the virus to residents in those areas.

If local transmission is confirmed, the cases would represent the first homegrown outbreak of Zika in the continental US. It would also suggest that Zika infections, which are linked to birth defects in pregnant women but otherwise mild illnesses in adults, may be spreading undetected among Floridians. Thus residents could conceivably donate blood containing infectious viruses without knowing it.

Warning: This piece contains minor spoilers for this week's episode of Mr. Robot, episode four of season two.

Mr. Robot rightfully gains a lot of attention for its obsession with detail. The show employs outside consultants to make sure things like its portrayal of the FBI or the bits of code flashing across the screen adhere as closely to reality as possible. As NPR TV Critic Eric Deggans told Ars ahead of the season two premiere, the show simply “gives viewers the feeling everything is grounded in reality… Because they get the details right, the average viewer—and 80 percent of the viewers may not know the computer stuff—can watch it and it feels right. And when the show has to do something that’s unrealistic, this makes it that much easier to buy it.”

It turns out this granular focus extends beyond the show's depiction of technology, hacking, or any of the related real world news—it includes video too. Last night's episode (S2E4, "init1.asec") opened with a flashback to Elliot Alderson and his sister Darlene watching a digital copy of one of their favorite childhood VHS tapes. Plot-wise, the sequence revealed a minor detail as it flushed out the origin story of the fsociety hacker mask. But that low impact didn't stop show creator Sam Esmail from ensuring this VHS film became fully realized.

Today, USA released the VHS—The Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie—online as a sub-10 minute film. Entertainment Weekly reports series staff writer/producer Adam Penn lovingly created this era-appropriate Easter egg, and a quick viewing will ring true for any fan of 1980s b-horror films. For a quick plot synopsis of this NSFW gem:

(credit: NASA)

Deep-space travel takes a toll on the body—and it’s apparently something you can’t moon-walk off.

Apollo astronauts who have ventured out of the protective magnetosphere of mother Earth appear to be dying of cardiovascular disease at a far higher rate than their counterparts—both those that have stayed grounded and those that only flew in the shielding embrace of low-Earth orbit. Though the data is slim—based on only 77 astronauts total—researchers speculate that potent ionizing radiation in deep space may be to blame. That hypothesis was backed up in follow-up mouse studies that provided evidence that similar radiation exposure led to long-lasting damage to the rodents’ blood vessels. All of the data was published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.

The study, while not definitive, may add an extra note of caution to the potential hazards of future attempts to fly to Mars and elsewhere in the cosmos.