Month: February 2019

(credit: Michael Galkovsky / Flickr)

Toothpicks seem so innocent. Whether staking down juicy sliders on game day or harpooning fruits bobbing in happy-hour cocktails, the mini skewers often spike our festive occasions. But, make no mistake, they have a vicious side. Given the chance, they will mess you up.

Of the poor souls who somehow ingest one of the wee daggers, 79 percent will end up with stab wounds their innards. Ten percent will die from their toothpick-inflicted injuries.

A new case study in the New England Journal of Medicine lays out some of the gory details behind those stats. A team of Boston doctors tell the woebegone tale of an unnamed, 18-year-old professional athlete who unknowingly swallowed a wooden toothpick. After weeks of abdominal pain, multiple visits to emergency rooms, bloody poops, and a life-threatening infection, doctors finally discovered it—lodged in his colon, piercing through his intestinal wall and into a neighboring, large artery. Then there was the harrowing effort to remove it and patch him up.

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  Strike up the music, the band has begun...

Here at Ars, decades of cheap, poorly made movie-to-game adaptations have made us deeply skeptical of the whole concept. For every Goldeneye or Lego Harry Potter out there, there are hundreds of quick cash-ins that give the whole idea a bad name.

Despite that well-earned skepticism, we're still at least a little intrigued by Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son. That's the new VR-exclusive semi-sequel to the hit 1993 Bill Murray movie being announced today (hey, happy Groundhog Day) by Sony Pictures Virtual Reality. It's coming "this year" to Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR.

If you're hoping to see Murray reprise his role as temporally-trapped Phil Connors, be aware that Like Father Like Son instead puts you in the shoes of "the charming but arrogant Phil Connors Jr." as the publisher-provided synopsis puts it. Dear old dad appears only in an Instagram-style photo montage in the trailer and in Junior's mind as a larger-than-life role model. "Living in his shadow was kind of tough," Junior opines at one point. Still, the press release does promise that "beloved characters from the 1993 film" will be making an appearance, and a slightly off-kilter version of good old Ned "The Head" Ryerson appears in a fever dream during the trailer.

Enlarge (credit: Jakub T. Jankiewicz / Flickr)

A cryptocurrency exchange in Canada has lost control of at least $137 million of its customers’ assets following the sudden death of its founder, who was the only person known to have access the the offline wallet that stored the digital coins. British Columbia-based QuadrigaCX is unable to access most or all of another $53 million because it’s tied up in disputes with third parties.

The dramatic misstep was reported in a sworn affidavit that was obtained by CoinDesk. The affidavit was filed Thursday by Jennifer Robertson, widow of QuadrigaCX’s sole director and officer Gerry Cotten. Robertson testified that Cotten died of Crohn’s disease in India in December at the age of 30.

Following standard security practices by many holders of cryptocurrency, QuadrigaCX stored the vast majority of its cryptocurrency holdings in a “cold wallet,” meaning a digital wallet that wasn’t connected to the Internet. The measure is designed to prevent hacks that regularly drain hot wallets of millions of dollars (Ars has reported on three such thefts here, here, and here.)

Filmmaker Tim Wardle released it in 2018, but the documentary Three Identical Stranger feels appropriately of its '80s era. Yes, it has the outfits and the crappy cars, but the film's first hour in particular has the kind of goofy buddy-movie feel that feels so cozy, you'd swear it was ripped out of fiction like Goonies or Ghostbusters.

These three guys just shy of 20—Bobby, David, and Eddy—recount their perspective on a gradually unraveling mystery involving each of them. It starts when Bobby goes to his first day of community college, and everyone seems to greet him as if they're old best friends. Then, Eddy's actual best friend recognizes the confusion on this seemingly familiar face and asks: you don't have a relative named Eddy, do you? 

Maybe you see where this is going and can already imagine the headlines (or Donahue or Today Show appearances). But Three Identical Stranger continues to play theaters today—and will air on CNN this Saturday, February 2—because the film has so much more to offer than a feel-good tale of lost siblings serendipitously finding each other. The documentary doesn't hide any supernatural elements like Goonies or Ghostbusters, but something otherworldly may or may not be happening.

Enlarge / Artist's depiction of a black hole. (credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab)

The problem with black holes is that the most interesting bits are hidden. The gravity of a black hole is such that everything—including light—is trapped if it gets closer than a certain distance. As a result, everything we observe about black holes comes from their effect on the world beyond that distance. Any closer and you pass the event horizon—the distance at which nothing escapes the black hole.

Jets are a common feature of black holes. They're narrow streams of high-energy particles that stream away from outside the event horizon. Their energy is such that the jets glow brightly, revealing themselves to us.

These jets may be able to tell us something about the black holes themselves, but that requires two things. One is observations that require a globe-spanning telescope. The second, more difficult requirement is that we need models that help us understand the observations, as we haven't built detailed models of the physics near the event horizon yet.