Month: July 2018

Enlarge / A family watches as a burial team lowers their loved one into a grave at the US-built cemetery for "safe burials" on January 27, 2015 in Disco Hill, Liberia, amid an Ebola epidemic. (credit: Getty | John Moore)

The World Health Organization on Tuesday declared the official end of the latest outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which tallied 54 cases, including 33 deaths. But a study published this week in the Lancet Infectious Diseases highlights just how tenuous such declarations can be when it comes to Ebola.

The study, led by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, traced a puzzling cluster of Ebola cases in Liberia to a mother who appeared to have had a stealthy, undiagnosed infection for more than a year. The cluster came to light when the woman’s 15-year-old son arrived at a hospital in Monrovia on November 17, 2015—more than two months after the country had been declared free of the disease in the wake of a massive outbreak that began in 2013. The woman’s husband and another of their four sons, an eight-year-old, subsequently tested positive for the virus.

Based on extensive epidemiological tracking, blood work, and viral genetic data, the researchers concluded that the woman likely picked up an Ebola infection in July of 2014. At the time, she was pregnant and caring for her brother, a nurse’s aide at a local clinic, who had come down with an illness after helping to treat an undiagnosed patient with symptoms consistent with Ebola. Her brother’s supervisor, wife, and seven-year-old son also fell ill.

Enlarge (credit: Paramount)

Remember when Tom Cruise could do no wrong—on top of the media world, as opposed to the top of Oprah Winfrey's couch? At his '80s best, a single Cruise wink-and-smile could melt the hearts of just about any watcher of shameless, crowd-pleasing films like Cocktail and Top Gun.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout has the distilled feeling of a classic Cruise wink, stretched out over a feature-length film. It's been a while since a PG-13 movie has delivered so much something-for-everyone magic—and it's right up there with 2008's Iron Man.

Brief relief before the insanity

Enlarge / #Cyberz. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

In a press briefing just two weeks ago, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that the grand jury assembled by Special Counsel Robert Mueller had returned an indictment against 12 officers of Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff (better known as Glavnoye razvedyvatel'noye upravleniye, or GRU). The indictment was for conducting "active cyber operations with the intent of interfering in the 2016 presidential election."

The filing [PDF] spells out the Justice Department's first official, public accounting of the most high-profile information operations against the US presidential election to date. It provides details down to the names of those alleged to be behind the intrusions into the networks of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the theft of emails of members of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign team, and various efforts to steal voter data and undermine faith in voting systems across multiple states in the run-up to the 2016 election.

The allegations are backed up by data collected from service provider logs, Bitcoin transaction tracing, and additional forensics. The DOJ also relied on information collected by US (and likely foreign) intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Reading between the lines, the indictment reveals that the Mueller team and other US investigators likely gained access to things like Twitter direct messages and hosting company business records and logs, and they obtained or directly monitored email messages associated with the GRU (and possibly WikiLeaks). It also appears that the investigation ultimately had some level of access to internal activities of two GRU offices.

Enlarge / The Rocket Report is published weekly. (credit: Arianespace/Aurich Lawson)

Welcome to Edition 1.10 of the Rocket Report! This week, we have lots of action from the European Space Agency's launch site in South America, multiple launches by SpaceX as it goes for two dozen flights this year, and updates on all of the big new rockets that may launch in 2020. Or, maybe not.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

A southern island in the Azores may make for a good spaceport. According to a new study commissioned by the European Space Agency, the mid-Atlantic island of Santa Maria, in the Azores, is suitable for the development of a spaceport for small rocket launchers, the local newspaper Público reported. Santa Maria already hosts an ESA ground tracking station for launches from Kourou, in French Guiana.

Enlarge (credit: Amazon)

In the wake of the American Civil Liberties Union’s test where 28 members of Congress were wrongly identified as arrestees via its Rekognition facial recognition service, some of those lawmakers have now raised serious concerns to the tech giant.

For now, Amazon has neither answered their questions, nor Ars’.

"We request an immediate meeting with you to discuss how to address the defects of this technology in order to prevent inaccurate outcomes," wrote Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-California) and Rep. John Lewis (D-Georgia), in a letter to CEO Jeff Bezos.