Month: December 2015

The married couple police say carried out Wednesday's shooting rampage that left 14 people dead in San Bernardino, California, took pains to erase their digital footprints in the hours leading up to the deadly attack, according to a published report.

The husband-and-wife team, identified as Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, stormed a conference room inside the Inland Regional Center as a holiday party took place Wednesday and sprayed the area with bullets, authorities said. The couple, who wore military-style gear and were armed with high-powered rifles, pipe bombs, and 1,500 rounds of ammunition, were killed by police following a high-speed chase following a multi-hour manhunt. According to a report published Thursday by The Washington Times, they took actions to hide their electronic trail. The report stated:

Officials involved in the investigation say the couple appeared to have gone to great lengths to conceal their plans—a cell phone recovered from Ms. Malik’s body was newly purchased and had had been used only recently. Two other cell phones that were recovered had been smashed with a hammer and were expected to be sent to the FBI’s forensic lab in Washington for examination.

Authorities also noted that a hard drive and motherboard are missing from a computer found at the Redlands, California home the couple rented.

Not all of their digital footprints were wiped clean, according to other reports. This Daily Caller post said Farook's online dating profile claimed he enjoyed reading religious books and engaging in shooting practice. The New York Times, meanwhile, said that an online baby registry in Malik's name showed the couple was expecting daughter to be born in May and listed diapers, baby wash, a car seat, and safety swabs.

Martin Shkreli being photographed for his role as CIO of MSMB Capital Management. (credit: Getty Images)

In a Healthcare summit hosted by Forbes on Thursday, Martin Shkreli, the founder and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, admitted he made a mistake by raising the price of a decades-old drug by more than 5,000 percent. But it’s not the mistake you might expect.

In response to an audience member who asked him if he would have done anything differently in regard to raising the price of the drug, Daraprim, Shkreli replied, “I probably would have raised the price higher.”

That price hike, which brought a pill of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 earlier this year, has drawn fiery scorn from the public, media, and lawmakers. Daraprim is a 62-year old drug used to treat toxoplasmosis, a disease caused by a parasitic infection. Toxoplasmosis often strikes people with compromised immune systems, such as AIDS patients.

(credit: Aaron Escobar/Wikimedia Commons)

Passing on the gym to snuggle on the couch and binge watch whole seasons of your favorite show this weekend may not bode well for your brain.

In a 25-year study that tracked more than 3,000 young adults into midlife, researchers found that those with the highest television watching and lowest physical activity scored worse on certain cognitive tests than their fit, less TV-addicted counterparts. In particular, couch potatoes had slightly lower brain processing speeds and worse executive function, but they scored just as well as other participants on verbal memory tests. The findings, reported in JAMA Psychiatry, may suggest that such bad TV and exercise habits early in life could set people up for faster cognitive decline in later life, the authors said.

However, the researchers can only speculate on cognitive decline for now, because they only tested cognitive skills at the end of the 25 years—not at the beginning. Therefore, it’s possible that participants with slightly lower cognitive function scores at the end of the study had those same low scores at the start and just enjoy spending lots of time lounging in front of glowing screens. Researchers can't tell from the data as is.

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Computers

In District Court on Wednesday, Hunter Moore, the notorious operator of a now-deduct revenge porn website called “IsAnybodyUp.com,” was sentenced to 30 months in prison on charges of computer hacking and identity theft.

Moore’s site posted nude and/or embarrassing photos of people without their consent, often along with the subjects’ names and other personal information. The site became known as a “revenge porn” website, as jilted exes submitted photos out of revenge. Earlier this year, Moore also pleaded guilty to paying co-conspirator Charles Evans up to $200 per week to steal nude photos from victims by accessing victims' e-mail accounts through social engineering.

Assistant US Attorney Wendy Wu told Ars in 2014, "Basically, he [Evans] was impersonating these victims' friends and was able to get confidential information that would allow him to access their accounts.”

An artistic interpretation of Bacteriophages. (credit: Flickr user: Zappy's Technological Solutions)

Bacteriophages, or viruses that infect bacteria, were on the cusp of becoming medical therapies in the middle of the twentieth century. But before the viruses got a shot in clinics, researchers discovered the wonder drugs that we now know as antibiotics. With those drugs now failing as pathogenic bacteria grow ever more resistance to classic and modern antibiotics, researchers are once again eyeing bacteriophages (or just “phages” to their friends) as attractive tools for combating infectious diseases.

This past July, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases hosted a conference on bacteriophage therapy with the stated goal of developing phages as “a means to specifically target antimicrobial resistance while preserving the natural microbiome.” Phage-based treatments can fight infections while helping to preserve the microbiome (our normal bacterial communities) because the viruses are much more specific than the broad-spectrum antibiotics now in use.

Today, those antibiotics indiscriminately kill a large range of microbes they encounter. But at the time researchers first developed and promoted antibiotics, they were unaware of the human microbiome's existence, let alone its importance.