Month: September 2017

Enlarge / Roughly translated, many parts of the Voynich Manuscript say that women should take a nice bath if they are feeling sick. Here you can see a woman doing just that.

Since its discovery in 1969, the 15th century Voynich Manuscript has been a mystery and a cult phenomenon. Full of handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with weird pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. Now, history researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs appears to have cracked the code, discovering that the book is actually a guide to women's health that's mostly plagiarized from other guides of the era.

Gibbs writes in the Times Literary Supplement that he was commissioned by a television network to analyze the Voynich Manuscript three years ago. Because the manuscript has been entirely digitized by Yale's Beinecke Library, he could see tiny details in each page and pore over them at his leisure. His experience with medieval Latin and familiarity with ancient medical guides allowed him to uncover the first clues.

After looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. "From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry," he wrote. "The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc." So this wasn't a code at all; it was just shorthand. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine.

flightradar24

Life in the 21st century doesn't mean being able to ignore natural disasters; 150mph winds, tsunami waves, and earthquakes will still mess up one's day. But living in what used to be the future does allow us to understand such phenomena. We can even simulate it, albeit poorly. Living in 2017 also allows you experience it vicariously, at a macro scale, live and at home. For years now, people have been collecting geotagged data and building online map layers, visualizing global shipping or air corridors. Scientific agencies publish data from satellite geosensors measuring land and sea temperatures. And we can use them to watch nature remind us of our place.

Take flight tracking. Yesterday, Jason Rabinowitz—@AirlineFlyer on Twitter—live-tweeted the progress of a Delta Boeing 737-900 that raced to into and then out of Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in Puerto Rico before Hurricane Irma made its presence known. The plane, flying JFK-SJU under the flight number DL 431, landed just before noon on Wednesday. In less than an hour, it had refueled, taken on 173 passengers, and then was back on its way to JFK. This time as DL302—which we noticed took off almost half an hour early—it was last plane to leave the island that day.

Enlarge (credit: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Yesterday, the credit reporting agency Equifax revealed that the personal data of 143 million US consumers, as well as "limited personal information for certain UK and Canadian residents," was exposed by an attack exploiting security flaws in the company's website. Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, and some drivers license numbers were all exposed—information which could be used to pose as individuals to gain access to financial accounts, open new ones in their names, or file fraudulent tax returns.

Equifax responded by offering all US citizens a one-year credit monitoring service. But the leaked data could have a much longer lifetime than a year on the black market for identity theft and credit fraud, because the information obtained in the attack is irreplaceable. Unlike relatively disposable data such as credit card information or bank account numbers, the data obtained from Equifax could be held for years before use and still be effective.

So what can affected consumers do? Unfortunately, as things stand, the burden is on you to protect yourself in the long term—and the credit reporting agencies stand to profit from it.

Enlarge / Pluto’s first official surface-feature names are marked on this map, compiled from images and data gathered by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its flight through the Pluto system in 2015. (credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Ross Beyer)

On Thursday, the International Astronomical Union announced that it had officially accepted the names for 14 features on the surface of the dwarf planet Pluto. While members of the scientific team behind the New Horizons probe had used a variety of names both informally and in academic publications, there was always the chance that those names would be tweaked or changed entirely. Now, 14 of the monikers have officially entered the record.

At least one of the names has already undergone a change from the initial weeks after New Horizons' visit. The large, heart-shaped plane was originally termed Sputnik Planum in honor of humanity's first orbital hardware. But well before this new announcement, that had been changed to Sputnik Planitia in order to bring it in line with naming conventions.

Sputnik Planitia is a clear example of the overarching theme identified for naming Pluto's features: famed explorers, human or otherwise. Other spacecraft honored include Hayabusa and Voyager, which each get a Terra, or large area of rugged terrain. There are proposals for Pioneer, Venera, and Viking Terra as well, but these haven't been formally accepted yet.

Enlarge / Intel demo of an HTC Vive with WiGig at Computex this year. (credit: Intel)

Intel is ending production of its 60GHz 802.11ad, also known as WiGig, controllers and antennas later this year. Anandtech writes that the company has sent end-of-life notifications for the high-speed wireless parts, and it will stop making and selling them in just a few months.

802.11ad boasts higher performance—up to 4.8 gigabits per second—than 802.11ac, but its use of the 60GHz frequency, rather than the 5GHz or 2.4GHz of mainstream Wi-Fi, means that it's limited to a very short range. It also requires line of sight between the device and the base station. Penetration through walls is essentially non-existent, so using 802.11ad as a Wi-Fi alternative would require a base station in every room.

This limits 802.11ad's use as a networking interface, but it does have an alternative use as a cable replacement. A handful of 802.11ad docking stations have come to market, enabling a laptop to connect to a monitor and other peripherals without using wires. In this application, the short-range and line-of-sight requirement is a lesser issue—both laptop and dock will probably be adjacent on a desk—but it hasn't had much mass-market impact. Apart from anything else, most people docking their laptop will probably want to charge it at the same time, so at least one cable is required anyway. With USB Type-C and Thunderbolt 3, that one cable can deliver both power and connectivity—up to 40 gigabits per second, nearly ten times the performance of WiGig—anyway.

Enlarge (credit: GotCredit)

By all accounts, the Equifax data breach is, as we reported Thursday, "very possibly the work leak of personal info ever." The incident affects possibly as many as 143 million people.

The breach, via a security flaw on the Equifax website, included full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and driver license numbers in some cases. Many of the affected consumers have never even directly done business with the giant consumer credit reporting agency.

But if you want to find out if your data might have been exposed, you have to waive your right to sue the Atlanta-based company. We're not making this up. The company has now published a website allowing consumers to input their last six digits of their Social Security numbers to find out.