Month: July 2016

(credit: Abraxas3d)

Topping the list of predatory business schemes, direct-to-consumer clinics peddling unproven stem cell therapies may be right up there with payday loans and Shkreli-esque drug pricing. Such clinics can tout dangerous, often exorbitantly priced “treatments.” They frequently target the vulnerable and desperate, including terminal cancer patients, parents of autistic children, and grown children of parents with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. And the results can range from placebos to bones in eyelids and scary growths on spinal cords.

We tend to think this kind of quackery only thrives in countries with lax regulations like China, India, or Mexico. The phrase “stem cell tourism” usually evokes a plane trip. But stem cell therapies are unexpectedly flourishing in the US and may only require a short car trip.

In an analysis published this week in Cell Stem Cell, researchers identified a startling 351 businesses, encompassing 570 clinics across the US, that offer stem cell therapies largely unproven and unapproved by the Food and Drug Administration. Without peer-reviewed evidence, these businesses and clinics claim their therapies can treat dozens of diseases, injuries, and cosmetic indications, including joint pain, autism, spinal cord injuries, muscular dystrophy, and breast augmentation. Costs can reach into tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for treatments.

Michelle Carter at a court hearing in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, last year. (credit: WPRI12)

Massachusetts' top court ruled Friday that a teenager may stand trial on involuntary manslaughter charges in connection to text messages she sent urging her friend to commit suicide.

In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Judicial Court said a local grand jury had enough probable cause to indict Michelle Carter in connection to the 2014 suicide of Carter Roy III, who was found dead about 50 miles south of Boston in a Fairhaven parking lot. The girl was 17 at the time of Roy's suicide, and she is accused of sending Roy several texts, including one saying "get back in" the day the 18-year-old teen took his own life via carbon monoxide fumes inside his truck.

The defendant's lawyers maintained that her texts were constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment. The court, however, did not create a bright line rule on where free speech ends and criminality begins. Instead, the court ruled that a physical act of violence is not necessary to sustain involuntary manslaughter charges and that each case is "entirely fact specific."

Privacy advocates take note: Android's full-disk encryption just got dramatically easier to defeat on devices that use chips from semiconductor maker Qualcomm, thanks to new research that reveals several methods to extract crypto keys off of a locked handset. Those methods include publicly available attack code that works against an estimated 37 percent of enterprise users.

A blog post published Thursday revealed that in stark contrast to the iPhone's iOS, Qualcomm-powered Android devices store the disk encryption keys in software. That leaves the keys vulnerable to a variety of attacks that can pull a key off a device. From there, the key can be loaded onto a server cluster, field-programmable gate array, or supercomputer that has been optimized for super-fast password cracking.

The independent researcher that published the post included exploit code that extracts the disk encryption keys by exploiting two vulnerabilities in TrustZone. TrustZone is a collection of security features within the ARM processors Qualcomm sells to handset manufacturers. By stitching together the exploits, the attack code is able to execute code within the TrustZone kernel, which is an enclave dedicated for sensitive operations such as managing cryptographic keys and protecting hardware.

Is it time to change that "III" into a "IV"? (credit: Blizzard)

Just because Blizzard finally got a wholly new franchise out the door this year doesn't mean the game maker isn't keen on milking its older franchises for everything they're worth. But one of those series, Diablo, has seen a bit of a content freeze since its 2014 expansion launched. While the company loves refreshing a game launch with expansion packs, Diablo III has been sitting idly. Now we might know why.

A brand-new "unannounced" entry in the Diablo world was, er, announced on Friday by way of an official job posting for—get this—the next entry's director. It's the game-news equivalent of New Line Cinema saying a new Lord of the Rings film is coming but, whoops, Peter Jackson's not involved, and they could really use a new person to get this thing up and running.

The post seeks someone to "lead the Diablo series into the future." While such a public push for a series director might read like an attempt to bring more diversity into the hiring pool, we'd frankly be shocked to see anybody other than the industry's old-guard vets fulfilling application requirements such as five years of game-directing experience and shipping "multiple AAA products as a game director or creative director." The job posting mentions nothing about virtual reality or other experimental hardware.

Virtual reality may be blowing up in tech circles, but mainstream pop culture has mostly kept an arm's-length distance from the movement. What's more, if you've seen a well-known celebrity in VR, that pretty much always means you've seen them in a 360-degree video—the kind that employs fixed video footage and therefore locks viewers into a single place as opposed to fully explorable virtual worlds.

Far-out musicians like Reggie Watts and Bjork have starred in 360-degree music-and-video experiments, while more mainstream artists like Jack White have published concert footage taken from a few 360-degree cameras. But if you're looking for a big musician who has launched anything resembling a fully VR experience, you surprisingly only have one option: Deadmau5, which launched a Google Cardboard-compatible VR app this week on iOS and Android.

Deadmau5 / Absolut

Deadmau5 in Absolut's new VR app, seen here VR-walking around a parking lot looking for his cat.

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The electronic music titan, aka Joel Zimmerman, lent his likeness, music, and input to Absolut Vodka to make a VR app. A skeptic might think this means a simple cash-in, but in an exclusive interview with Ars, Deadmau5 admitted he was pretty involved in its creation—because he's got serious VR dreams.

(credit: Getty Images | aledettaale)

AT&T is getting some help from Frontier Communications in its attempt to block Google Fiber's progress in Kentucky.

As we reported in February, AT&T sued the local government in Louisville and Jefferson County, Kentucky to stop a new ordinance designed to give Google Fiber and similar companies access to utility poles. Although Frontier has no operations in Kentucky, it submitted a court filing last week supporting AT&T's lawsuit because Frontier is worried such ordinances will come to other states.

AT&T did not ask Frontier for its help, but Frontier's filing said, "the issues raised by the case may have important implications for Frontier’s business and may impact the development of law in jurisdictions throughout the country where Frontier operates."

(credit: Walter Reed National Military Medical Center)

It's not an exaggeration to say that functional MRI has revolutionized the field of neuroscience. Neuroscientists use MRI machines to pick up changes in blood flow that occur when different areas of the brain become more or less active. This allows them to noninvasively figure out which areas of the brain get used when performing different tasks, from playing economic games to reading words.

But the approach and its users have had their share of critics, including some who worry about over-hyped claims about our ability to read minds. Others point out that improper analysis of fMRI data can produce misleading results, such as finding areas of brain activity in a dead salmon. While that was the result of poor statistical techniques, a new study in PNAS suggests that the problem runs significantly deeper, with some of the basic algorithms involved in fMRI analysis producing false positive "signals" with an alarming frequency.

The principle behind fMRI is pretty simple: neural activity takes energy, which then has to be replenished. This means increased blood flow to areas that have been recently active. That blood flow can be picked up using a high-resolution MRI machine, allowing researchers to identify structures in the brain that become active when certain tasks are performed.