Month: February 2016

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, the Los Angeles hospital held hostage by crypto-ransomware, has opted to pay a ransom of 40 bitcoins—the equivalent of $17,000—to the group that locked down access to the hospital's electronic medical records system and other computer systems. The decision came 10 days after the hospital lost access to patient records.

"HPMC has restored its EMR on Monday, February 15^th," President and CEO of Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center Allen Stefanek wrote in a statement published by the hospital late Wednesday. "All clinical operations are utilizing the EMR system. All systems currently in use were cleared of the malware and thoroughly tested. We continue to work with our team of experts to understand more about this event."

The first signs of trouble at HPMC came on February 5, when hospital employees reported being unable to get onto the hospital's network. "Our IT department began an immediate investigation and determined we had been subject to a malware attack," Stefanek wrote. "The malware locked access to certain computer systems and prevented us from sharing communications electronically."

(credit: Wolfman-K)

The immune system of an adult is shaped by both genetic factors and every microbe we've ever been in contact with. The result is a unique set of things we can recognize, called an immunorepertoire. Environmental influences—things like infections and age—are thought to account for at least half of the differences in our individual immunorepertoires.

Since these nongenetic factors can, in theory, be manipulated more readily than genetic ones, it might be nice to know what they are and how precisely they impact our immune systems. A study published this week in Nature aims to look into just that.

Researchers looked at the different compositions of immune cell types in 638 healthy Caucasian Belgians ranging in age from two to 86. They found that different healthy people have a different complement of immune cells. Immature precursor cells are the most variable between individuals; while activated, mature cell types are more similar.

(credit: Matthias Töpfer)

Twitter has applied a fix to what it described as a "password recovery bug" that has exposed nearly 10,000 accounts on the microblogging site.

The company added in a blog post that the e-mail addresses and phone numbers attached to those accounts had been affected by the security flaw. It said:

We take these incidents very seriously, and we’re sorry this occurred.

Any user that we find to have exploited the bug to access another account’s information will be permanently suspended, and we will also be engaging law enforcement as appropriate so they may conduct a thorough investigation and bring charges as warranted.

In this instance, Twitter said that the security blunder had not revealed the affected users' passwords.

A Roman coin found at the site of Sandby Borg, whose inhabitants probably included a number of unemployed Roman soldiers. (credit: Max Jahrehorn Oxides)

On Öland, an icy, barren island off the coast of Sweden, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a 1,500-year-old fort whose inhabitants were brutalized in such an extreme way that legends about it persist to this day. As researchers piece together the fort's final days, it sounds like they're telling a horror story.

Possibly hundreds of people sheltering behind the fort's defenses were executed and abandoned, their bodies left to rot in place without burial. Their wounds were indicative of execution. And some of their mouths were stuffed with goat and sheep teeth, possibly a dark reference to the Roman tradition of burying warriors with coins in their mouths.

None of their considerable wealth was looted, which is highly unusual. Researchers have found barely hidden valuables in every house they've excavated. Even the livestock was left behind after the slaughter, locked up to die of starvation. This is even more bizarre than the lack of looting. On an island with scarce resources, it would have been considered a waste for victors (or neighbors) to leave healthy horses and sheep behind after battle.

The Nextbit Robin.

12 more images in gallery

Now here's something you don't see every day: a brand new smartphone company. "Nextbit" is a San Francisco-based OEM that was only founded in 2013. Today, thanks to the magic of Kickstarter, the company has shipped its first-ever smartphone called the Nextbit Robin.

While the name is new, the company is made up of some notable industry veterans. The founders, Tom Moss and Mike Chan, are both former Googlers from the Android team. Moss is also a founding board member of Cyanogen, Inc. Nextbit's lead designer, Scott Croyle, was snatched away from HTC where he was responsible for everything from the legendary HTC Evo to the HTC One M8.