Month: September 2016

Enlarge / This screenshot is a crop of the full 3840x2160 rendering in Halo 5 Forge on Windows 10. The full 4K image is in a gallery below. But if you want to believe in 4K Halo, this high-res crop just might convince you.

When Microsoft announced Halo 5 Forge as a free, Windows 10-only game, we wondered exactly what gamers would and wouldn't get from its eventual September launch. We knew the free download would include the series' long-running "Forge" mode (since, hey, it's titular), meaning players would be able to use mice and keyboards to build their own custom Halo 5 maps and online-combat alterations. But what else?

Microsoft confirmed to me in May that the mode would also enable online multiplayer, so users wouldn't have to dash to an Xbox One console to test their Forge creations. You could build your own level then invite anybody on your Xbox Live friends list to join a battle in Halo 5's "custom game" mode so long as they too were running the limited, Windows 10 version of the game. That didn't sound like a bad freebie, but it seemed like a pretty limited tease and/or advertisement of what Halo 5 on console offers.

What Microsoft didn't tell me back then, and instead revealed on Thursday with the free download's launch, is that the free game includes some pre-made levels. Not just the weird-looking Forge ones, either.

(credit: cia.gov)

Federal authorities have arrested two men on charges they were part of a group that broke into the private e-mail accounts of high-ranking US government officials and a Justice Department computer system.

Andrew Otto Boggs, 22, of North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and Justin Gray Liverman, 24, of Morehead City, North Carolina, were part of a group calling itself "Crackas with Attitude," federal prosecutors alleged. Although an FBI affidavit filed in the case didn't identify the targeted government officials by name, The Washington Post and other news organizations, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, said they included CIA Director John Brennan, then-Deputy FBI Director Mark Giuliano, National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper, and other high-ranking officials. The group also used its unauthorized access to a Justice Department management system to obtain and later publish the names, phone numbers, and other personal details of more than 29,000 FBI and Department of Homeland Security officials.

According to the affidavit, the group didn't rely on computer hacking to break into restricted accounts. Instead, they used social engineering, in which they impersonated their targets and various IT support personnel purporting to help the victims. On October 11, 2015, one of the suspects allegedly accessed the account of one target, identified by the WaPo as Brennan, by posing as a technician from Verizon. The suspect then tricked another Verizon employee into resetting the password for Brennan's Internet service. Prosecutors said the suspects went on to take over a Brennan AOL account.

Enlarge / Formula 1 made Bernie Ecclestone one of the richest men on earth. For the last 10 years its made CVC Capital Partners at least $5 billion in profit. But it's to have a new owner, in the form of Liberty Media Group. (credit: Getty Images | Clive Mason)

Change is (probably) coming to Formula One. Rumors had been surfacing recently regarding possible new ownership of the racing series, and those rumors proved correct on Wednesday. US-based Liberty Media Corp. announced it will purchase F1. The deal will cost Liberty Media $1.1 billion in cash along with a large number of shares, and the company will assume $4.1 billion of debt.

The purchase could mean big things for F1 fans in the US and on the Internet, two markets the sport has thus far found unfathomable under the leadership of Bernie Ecclestone. Sadly, however, the 85-year old businessman might be a fixture in F1 circles for a while longer.

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Enlarge / The drug is what chemists might refer to as a bit of a beast. (credit: John Timmer)

Last year, there were over 200 million cases of malaria, and they resulted in nearly half a million deaths. Efforts to control the disease have had limited success. The mosquitos that carry it have rapidly evolved resistance to insecticides like DDT, and there are now areas of the globe where the parasite that causes the disease are resistant to even our most effective treatment.

Efforts to develop new drugs are challenging. The malarial parasite, Plasmodium, is a eukaryote like us, and thus it shares a lot of basic biochemistry. That makes it harder to find a drug that targets the parasite but not human cells. Plasmodium also has a complex life cycle, with stages that are rather distinct. That makes generating vaccines difficult, and it ensures some treatments only work on a subset of these stages.

But new approaches to screening drugs have turned up a number of promising leads in recent years. One success, reported this week in Nature, involves a drug that targets a Plasmodium protein that no other drug works on. In tests on mice, the drug was able to clear an infection with a single dose.

(credit: Mike Mozart)

Since at least 2011, Wells Fargo employees have been creating fake accounts using customers’ identities to boost their sales numbers, federal regulators said on Thursday.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) fined the bank $100 million after a third-party consulting firm found that 2 million fake deposit and credit card accounts had been made without the consent of the person whose name was on the account. According to CNN Money, the bank fired 5,300 employees for taking part in the scheme, which constitutes about 1 percent of the bank’s payroll.

In order to boost their sales numbers, employees opened 1.5 million deposit accounts and 565,000 credit card accounts on customers’ behalf but without authorization from those customers. “Employees then transferred funds from consumers’ authorized accounts to temporarily fund the new, unauthorized accounts,” the CFPB wrote. “This widespread practice gave the employees credit for opening the new accounts, allowing them to earn additional compensation and to meet the bank’s sales goals.”

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Zhang Peng)

Anyone who’s lived in a smoggy city would likely welcome the idea of using widely dispersed air filters to soak up all those toxic tidbits floating around—unless, of course, those filters were functioning human brains.

Our noggins naturally catch and collect the toxic, magnetic nanoparticles that we inadvertently inhale from polluted air, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Those wee particles, made of the strongly magnetic iron oxide compound, magnetite, have been found in human brains before and were thought to be normal and harmless byproducts of biological processes. But according to the new study, a closer examination of minuscule metal balls in 37 human brains revealed that they’re actually from smog, formed during combustion or friction-derived heating, such as slamming on the brakes of a car.

Whether the particles are harmful is hazy, but the authors note that the nanomagnets have two troubling features: they can interact with misfolded proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease to produce reactive oxygen species, which can severely damage cells; and large amounts of them in the brain correlated with Alzheimer’s disease in earlier studies. Given these potential risks, the authors—a team of researchers from the UK and Mexico—suggest that exposure to them “might need to be examined as a possible hazard to human health.”