Month: November 2018

Enlarge / If you consider 10:50 a reasonable time to wake up, it may or may not say something about your breast-cancer risk. (credit: Henrique Simplicio / Flickr)

A paper presented at the National Cancer Research Institute this week has made for some flashy headlines, like this confident declaration from India’s Economic Times: “Ladies, check your alarm: Waking up early may cut breast-cancer risk.” But most headlines have been appropriately measured and wordy, like The Independent’s “Women who prefer to wake up early have lower risk of breast cancer than night owls.”

In amidst the largely cautious coverage is a truckload of confusion over the details. Some reports frame the paper’s findings as being about preference (preferring to wake up early or stay up late) while others frame them as being about behavior (actually waking up earlier, regardless of preference). Some hold questions of cause and effect at arm’s length, while others dive right in with claims about sleep habits causing cancer.

And what’s the data that was used by the National Cancer Research Institute? Health News Review, in its critique of media coverage of the research, reports that researchers examined “self-reported responses” about being a morning person, but genetic data came into the mix, too.

Enlarge (credit: D-Link)

A recently discovered botnet has taken control of an eye-popping 100,000 home and small-office routers made from a range of manufacturers, mainly by exploiting a critical vulnerability that has remained unaddressed on infected devices more than five years after it came to light.

Researchers from Netlab 360, who reported the mass infection late last week, have dubbed the botnet BCMUPnP_Hunter. The name is a reference to a buggy implementation of the Universal Plug and Play protocol built into Broadcom chipsets used in vulnerable devices. An advisory released in January 2013 warned that the critical flaw affected routers from a raft of manufacturers, including Broadcom, Asus, Cisco, TP-Link, Zyxel, D-Link, Netgear, and US Robotics. The finding from Netlab 360 suggests that many vulnerable devices were allowed to run without ever being patched or locked down through other means.

Last week's report documents 116 different types of devices that make up the botnet from a diverse group of manufacturers. Once under the attackers' control, the routers connect to a variety of well-known email services. This is a strong indication that the infected devices are being used to send spam or other types of malicious mail.

Enlarge / Puttin' on an axion. (credit: Stephen Kennedy / Flickr)

Dark matter is a theory that is excellent for inspiring new theories. It also seems to be an excellent way to generate new and expensive detector hardware. A new paper bucks the trend, though, proposing a dark-matter experiment that seems almost... cheap.

Chris’ theory of theoretical physics

I have a rather dark view of theoretical physics.

Unbeknownst to most, theoretical physicists (there is no other type) increase their stability by splitting into two, which happens during a process known as defending a PhD. During this fission, new dark-matter-particle candidates are emitted, mostly of a variety called axions. Whenever there is a conference of theoretical physicists, critical mass is exceeded, and an explosion of more dark-matter-candidate particles is produced. These events will occasionally emit large and expensive experiments.

Evan Hurd/Sygma/Corbis via Getty Images

Stan Lee—the Marvel Comics legend responsible for cultural icons from Spider-Man and Iron Man to X-Men and Black Panther—has died according to multiple reports from places like TMZ and The Hollywood Reporter.

THR spoke with a source that said Lee died early Monday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. TMZ spoke to Lee's daughter, J.C., who said an ambulance rushed to Lee's Hollywood Hills home early Monday morning to take him to Cedars-Sinai. That outlet noted Lee had suffered several illnesses over the last year or so, including dealing with pneumonia. Lee was 95 years old.

(credit: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad+Pro+11-Inch+Teardown/115457)

Following the controlled destruction of the Mac mini and the MacBook Air, iFixit turned its gaze to the new 11-inch iPad Pro. Its teardown reveals lots of adhesive, even more magnets, and only a few surprises inside the newest Apple tablet.

Unsurprisingly, the super-narrow bezels make the new iPad Pro harder to get into than the previous models. Awkwardly positioned display ribbons make removing the display more difficult, but underneath it we find the usual suspects: the logic board, speakers, TrueDepth camera array, and batteries, to name a few components.

The new iPad Pro should be an entertainment powerhouse thanks to a total of eight speakers, composed of four woofers and four tweeters. Combine those with the Liquid Retina display with a 120Hz refresh rate, and you have a stellar music and video consumption device. However, the speakers proved impossible to remove without destroying a portion of them, thanks to their housings being carved into the aluminum case. Magnets also live under the speakers, and those are just a fraction of the magnets present inside the iPad Pro.

Enlarge / On July 20, 1969, NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the Moon. (credit: NASA)

When Neil Armstrong took his legendary first steps on the Moon on July 20, 1969, it defined a generation. As NASA prepares to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing next year, it has released newly unearthed backchannel conversations from the mission to the public, giving us an unprecedented peek at what was happening behind the scenes.

The main air-to-ground recordings and on-board recordings from the historic mission have been publicly available online for decades. But that was just a fraction of the recorded communications for the mission. Thousands of hours of supplementary conversations ("backroom loops") between flight controllers and other support teams languished in storage at the National Archives and Records Administration building in Maryland—until now.

Thanks to a year-long project to locate, digitize, and process all that extra audio (completed in July), diehard space fans can now access a fresh treasure trove of minutiae from the Apollo 11 mission. And those records are now preserved for future generations.