Month: April 2016

Enlarge / Felicity Jones stars as Jyn Erso. (credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wji-BZ0oCwg)

The first installment of the reborn Star Wars is now out for people to watch at home, and the second mainline movie is in production for a December 2017 release. But fans of the Force won’t have to wait until the end of next year to revisit that far, far away galaxy: Disney’s next Star Wars movie actually hits this Christmas. It’s the first in a set of spin-off movies, and as we learned about a year ago, it’s called Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The first teaser for it landed this morning.

The teaser opens with a soft piano variation on the classic "Force theme" leitmotif (soft piano variations on old movie themes are all the rage these days in trailers!). We’re quickly introduced to plucky cynical misfit Jyn Erso, played by Felicity Jones, who it seems has quite the criminal record in the Galactic Empire. The trailer shows us where and when the film takes place: Erso is recruited by Rebellion leader Mon Mothma for a mission to steal the plans for the Death Star (presumably the first one).

The teaser is short on details and dialog but long on visuals, and the visuals tugged at this old Star Wars fan’s heartstrings. Star Destroyers, Stormtroopers, and spaceships abound; the Death Star’s signature hooting alert klaxon dominates the audio for a big chunk of the trailer as the action ramps up, culminating in a hand-held shot of (again, presumably) Rebellion fighters running along the sand of a beach while Imperial AT-ATs tower over them, firing down at the camera.

Enlarge (credit: A)

MedStar, the health network of 10 Maryland hospitals struck by a ransomware attack last week, has now reportedly brought all its systems back online without paying attackers. But a MedStar spokesperson denied reports that the attack was made possible because the health provider's IT department failed to make fixes to systems that had been issued years ago. Ars will publish an in-depth analysis of the techniques used by the Samsam ransomware attackers this Friday.

Tami Abdollah of the Associated Press reported Tuesday that an anonymous source "familiar with the investigation" of the cyberattack claimed that the flaws that allowed attackers to compromise a JBoss Web application server and attack the network with Samsam crypto-ransomware had been highlighted in security warnings from JBoss maintainer Red Hat, the US government and others in February 2007, March 2010, and again this month.

MedStar denies that the earlier warnings—including one issued as a security advisory by Red Hat in April 2010—had anything to do with the attack, according to the findings of a response team from Symantec. "News reports circulating about the malware attack on MedStar Health’s IT system are incorrect," a MedStar spokesperson said in a statement. "Our partner Symantec, a global leader in cybersecurity, has been on the ground from the start of the situation and has been conducting a thorough forensic analysis, as they have done for many other leading companies around the world. In reference to the attack at MedStar, Symantec said, 'The 2007 and 2010 fixes referenced in the article were not contributing factors in this event.'"

A few months ago, Blizzard launched a closed beta for its upcoming shooter Overwatch—and I've been engrossed in the PC version ever since. For all its faults—and there are many faults—it's hard not be impressed with not just how much fun Overwatch is, but how Blizzard's managed to successfully combine a solid first-person shooter along the same lines as Team Fortress 2 with the mechanics of a modern MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) like its own Heroes of the Storm and Riot's League of Legends.

That Blizzard's managed to create a compelling online experience comes as little surprise. This is, after all, the same studio that kept millions upon millions of players hooked to World of Warcraft for over a decade, and created Hearthstone, one of the most popular online collectible card games. With Overwatch, it has its sights set not just on creating the most popular online shooter, but one that can take on MOBAs on their home turf: the e-sports arena.

It's been hard to picture Overwatch as a crowd-pleasing, e-sports giant as I've sat alone in my bedroom moaning about what a bully Bastion (a transforming battle robot character) is to others over a clip-on voice mic. But now, sat with a team playing a huge multiplayer game at an event in London's Soho, and struggling against an unfair number of turrets from the opposition, Blizzard's e-sports vision is a little clearer.

Diagram of a microbial fuel cell that runs on acetate, one-half of the bacterial battery described here. (credit: Oak Ridge National Lab)

The chemical that powers most of our cellular processes is produced through something called the electron transport chain. As its name suggests, this system shuffles electrons through a series of chemicals that leaves them at a lower energy, all while harvesting some of the energy difference to produce ATP.

But the ultimate destination of this electron transport chain doesn't have to be a chemical. There are a variety of bacteria that ultimately send the electrons off into the environment instead. And researchers have figured out how to turn these into a fuel cell, harvesting the electrons to do something useful. While some of these designs were closer to a battery than others, all of them consumed some sort of material in harvesting the electrons.

A team of researchers in the Netherlands figured out how to close the loop and create an actual bacterial battery. One half of the battery behaves like a bacterial fuel cell. But the second half takes the electrons and uses them to synthesize a small organic molecule that the first can eat. Its charging cycle is painfully slow and its energy density is atrocious, but the fact that it works at all seems rather noteworthy.