Month: November 2016

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | arcoss)

The mere presence of gigabit Internet speeds in a metro area drives down the price of plans with slower speeds, according to new industry-funded research. Thus, the data suggests that even customers who don't purchase gigabit Internet benefit from its availability.

This research also found—to no one’s surprise—that having more ISPs in a particular region drives prices down and that the presence of fast speeds encourages other ISPs to offer higher-speed plans to match their competitors.

The study, titled “Broadband competition helps to drive lower prices and faster download speeds for US residential consumers,” analyzed DSL, cable, and fiber broadband plans from the 100 largest DMAs (designated market areas) in the US. It was written by Analysis Group, an economics consulting firm, with research funding from the Fiber to the Home Council, an industry consortium founded by fiber network equipment manufacturers.

Enlarge (credit: Schrecklicher Blattsteiger/Wikimedia Commons)

The endangered golden poison arrow frog Phyllobates terribilis lives in the rain forests along the northern Pacific coast of Colombia. Its skin contains batrachotoxin, a lethal poison that prevents nerve and muscle cells from firing properly. That substance makes muscles contract and leads to heart failure or fibrillation. Each frog contains about a milligram of the toxin, enough to kill 10,000 mice, 20 people, or two elephants. A whale might survive ingesting the frog, but anything else that eats this frog dies.

Batrachotoxin works by activating proteins called voltage gated sodium ion channels. These are specialized proteins located within cell membranes that respond to changes in voltage across the cell membrane by opening up a central pore. This allows positively charged sodium ions to flow into the cell before the pore quickly closes up again. This helps the cell reset the voltage differential cross the membrane, allowing future electrical signals and messages to be propagated along the length of neurons.

The frog toxin binds to the inner pore of the channel and props it open, allowing sodium ions to continuously flood into the cell. The cell never resets, so any signal it transmits will be its last.

The terrifying message sent to the people involved in the phone reselling scheme. (credit: DansDeals)

An odd story popped up this week on the deal site DansDeals. There was some kind of "deal" that involved making money through the resale of Google's Pixel phones, and once Google caught wind of it, a lot of people had their Google accounts banned.

Apparently a phone reseller in New Hampshire was running some kind of crowd-sourced inventory acquisition program using the consumer Google site. It instructed people to buy phones from the Project Fi site and list the dealer's NH address as their "home address" so phones would be shipped directly to the dealer. The buyers were then paid enough to make a profit on the transaction (probably helped by the fact that NH has no sales tax), and the New Hampshire dealer would later resell the phone at a markup.

When Google caught wind of the shipping shenanigans, it "suspended" the Google Accounts of everyone that shipped a phone to the dealer. That means these users were banned from every Google service—Gmail, all their pictures on Google Photos, their documents on Google Drive, and every other piece of Google data was taken away. Something like this wouldn't only affect Google services; think about how many sites do authentication or send critical information over e-mail.

A 24-year-old Ohio man faces up to five years in prison for allegedly tweeting that he wanted to kill President-elect Donald Trump, a message the government says he tweeted in the early morning hours after Election Day.

Zachary Benson's tweets and Twitter account have been deleted. He was apparently none too happy that the Republican candidate won. According to the government, he tweeted, "Diplomacy. Fucking Fools. I hate you all. I want to bomb every one of your voting booths and your general areas." About 20 minutes later, at 1:42am EDT, he allegedly tweeted again: "My life goal is to assassinate Trump. Don't care if I serve infinite sentences. That man deserves to decease existing."

Zachary Benson. (credit: Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Sheriff's Office)

Benson was released Thursday on a $20,000 unsecured bond (PDF) after being arrested (PDF) on November 10. He is accused of violating a criminal section of the law that makes it illegal to threaten the president or president-elect.

Enlarge / Representative Michael "Mike" Pompeo, during an interview in 2013. Pompeo won an election for the first time in 2010 following a career as an army officer, tax lawyer, aerospace entrepreneur, and Republican National Committee member. Photographer: Julia Schmalz/Bloomberg via Getty Images

President-elect Donald J. Trump has made three key national security picks this morning, tapping Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) as Attorney General, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) as head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and retired Gen. Michael Flynn as his security adviser.

Pompeo, the 52-year-old conservative Congressman, is a surprise choice, but he agrees with Trump on key issues. Just yesterday he tweeted his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, saying that he looked forward to "rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism."

Pompeo joined Congress in 2010, coming in as part of a wave of Republicans affiliated with the Tea Party movement. Before his political career, Pompeo worked as a lawyer and founded an aerospace company.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

While New Horizons has gotten much of the planetary science glory this year after returning data from its spectacular Pluto flyby in 2015, NASA's Dawn spacecraft has continued to plug along in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt.

On Friday NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory released two new images of Ceres; a view of the intriguing Occator Crater that provides new perspective on the distinctive feature and a global image of Ceres that represents how the world would appear to the naked eye, were a human in orbit. (If only.)