Canadian grad student Pramodh Yapa wrote, choreographed, and shot video in 6 weeks.
Cooper pairs and impurities come to life in a superconductor and dance their little particle hearts out in Pramodh Yapa's "Superconductivity: The Musical."
Pairs of swing-dancing electrons do the Lindy Hop in "Superconductivity: The Musical," the winning video for this year's geektastic Dance Your PhD contest. Pramodh Yapa, a graduate student at the University of Alberta, Canada, beat out roughly 50 other entries for the interpretive dance based on his master's thesis, "Non-Local Electrodynamics of Superconducting Wires: Implications for Flux Noise and Inductance."
The Dance Your PhD contest was established in 2008 by science journalist John Bohannon, and is sponsored by Science magazine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Bohannon told Slate in 2011 that he came up with the idea while trying to figure out how to get a group of stressed-out PhD students in the middle of defending their theses to let off a little steam. So he put together a dance party at Austria's Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, including a contest for whichever candidate could best explain their thesis topics with interpretive dance.
Science kicked in a free one-year subscription as a reward. It was such a hit, Bohannon started getting emails asking when the next such contest would be. And Dance Your PhD has continued ever since. There are four broad categories: physics, chemistry, biology, and social science, with a fairly liberal interpretation of what topics fall under each.
Several torrent sites have banned the account of the popular software uploader CracksNow. The software and cracks were repeatedly flagged as malicious and some came with the GandCrab ransomware. While malicious torrents are nothing new, it’s rare for this to happen via a “trusted” uploader.
The entertainment industries regularly warn the public at large that pirate sites are riddled with malware and viruses, posing a threat to unwitting visitors.
While these comments are partly made out of self-interest, they’re not entirely overblown. There are indeed plenty of scammers who upload nasty content that is added to, or disguised as, popular files.
This is nothing new and generally speaking, these files are easy to spot and swiftly removed from well-moderated sites. However, in a recent case, this wasn’t as apparent, since it involved a well-known uploader that had a “trusted’ status on some sites.
The uploader in question is Cracksnow, who shared tens of thousands of cracked software titles in recent years. A dedicated group of followers watched these torrents and “Cracksnow” was previously listed as one of the most searched for terms on torrent sites.
In recent months, however, numerous reports claimed that these popular releases contained malware, or even ransomware, which can do serious harm to one’s computer.
Below is an example of a now-removed torrent on 1337x.to which reportedly included a copy of the GandCrab ransomware.
Ransom?
A few of these reports are nothing out of the ordinary. Anti-virus vendors sometimes flag cracks as malicious, without good reason, for example. Also, “rival” uploaders may try to discredit the competition with fake malware reports.
However, in the case of CracksNow, the complaints were plentiful, persistent, and not without consequence.
Earlier this month, the popular torrent site 1337x took action and banned the account. This is quite unusual since it was a “trusted” uploader, but a senior staffer informs TorrentFreak that the reports were warranted.
“He was banned by myself because I found ransomware in his uploads,” the 1337x admin, who prefers not to be named, tells us.
“I also checked the same uploads from him on a couple other torrent sites and got the same results. I immediately alerted their staff about it so they could investigate and take appropriate action, which they did,” the admin adds.
GandCrab 5.1, found by the admin
Indeed, several other torrent sites, including TorrentGalaxy, have banned the CracksNow account as well. A Pirate Bay admin also confirmed that the uploader was purged from their site months ago, but no reason was specified.
Every day moderators on torrent sites have to review a lot of reported torrents. These are all checked carefully and in many cases, there’s nothing malicious going on. That said, malware infested torrents are found on a daily basis.
The 1337x admin informs us that they have a system in place to ensure that things don’t get out of hand. This includes an approval process for uploaders. However, this obviously isn’t perfect.
“It is a daily battle to sort the scumbags from the legit uploaders and staff work very hard but it’s not foolproof. What I will say is staff are very quick to adapt to all the new ways people try to beat our systems,” the admin says.
In the case of CracksNow, the moderators didn’t see it coming. That said, the account is banned now and the team believes that all malicious torrents have been deleted.
“I must admit that it is rare for a trusted uploader of this caliber to go rogue. It’s normally new guys that have the infected files,” the 1337x admin notes.
“CracksNow was a trusted uploader and had been warned in the past but only for misdemeanors. To the best of our knowledge, the remaining torrents are ransomware free but his account is due for removal.”
Banned!
Indeed, while many recent torrents have been deleted, the CracksNow account and many older torrents remain available. This is because the site has some built-in protections which makes it hard to delete accounts with this many torrents.
The moderation team doesn’t believe these older torrent are malicious but it’s working on a full removal of the account. This will take some time though.
While CracksNow is no longer welcome at several torrent sites, the uploader still has his own home at CracksNow.com. Plenty of new uploads still appear there regularly.
TorrentFreak reached out to the uploader to hear the other side of the story, but after a few days, we have yet to get a response.
A video shows 10,000 maggots consuming a 16-inch pizza in just two hours.
Enlarge/ Studying the collective feeding behavior of black soldier fly larvae. (credit: Hu lab/Georgia Tech)
How do the larvae of black soldier flies eat so much, so fast, despite their tiny size? Scientists at Georgia Tech have been studying this "collective feeding" behavior and found that one strategy for maximizing the larvae's feeding rate involves forming maggot "fountains." The scientists described the results in a recent paper in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, along with an entertaining video showing a swarm of larvae consuming an entire pizza in just two hours.
"This is the first time, as far as I know, that we've really tried to quantify how much they were able to eat, and how they are able to do it," said graduate student and co-author Olga Shishkov, who demonstrated the research on Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington, DC. It's not the first time she's had fun demonstrating the maggots' hearty appetite in creative ways: last year, she videotaped the critters devouring a heart-shaped donut for Valentine's Day.
Shishkov's advisor is David Hu, who runs a biolocomotion laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology studying how various creatures move. He is perhaps best known for his work with fire ants, but his lab also studies cat tongues, water striders, snakes, various climbing insects, mosquitos, and, of course, black soldier fly larvae.
New Zealand writer-director Tim van Dammen says his film “celebrates Kiwi-ness.”
Enlarge/ Seeing double: John (Anton Tennett) steals a magic bracelet from a Chinese antiques store that gives him the ability to go back in time in Mega Time Squad. (credit: Vimeo/Tim van Dammen)
A magic bracelet doubles as a time-traveling device for a down-on-his-luck small-time criminal in the 2018 New Zealand sci-fi comedy Mega Time Squad. A favorite of the festival circuit, this quirky twist on the time travel genre is finally available in select theaters and on VOD in the United States.
If Chinese electronics company TCL may be better known in the US for its TVs than its smartphones, that’s because the company doesn’t use its own name on phones sold in the US. But if you buy a recent BlackBerry smartphone anywhere other th…
If Chinese electronics company TCL may be better known in the US for its TVs than its smartphones, that’s because the company doesn’t use its own name on phones sold in the US. But if you buy a recent BlackBerry smartphone anywhere other than India, you’re probably using a device manufactured by TCL. The company […]
The company says its truck and SUV will be ready for delivery by late 2020.
Enlarge/ A marketing photo of Rivian's R1T electric pickup truck. (credit: Rivian)
On Friday, electric truck startup Rivian announced a $700 million funding round led by Amazon. The announcement is notable not just for the size of the investment but also due to Amazon's involvement.
Rivian's R1T pickup and R1S SUV made a splash at their announcement. The startup is seen as a potential competitor to Tesla, which has promised to develop an all-electric pickup truck in the future. Rivian's trucks are expected to be pricy: the startup is taking pre-orders, and it said in November that, when the R1T and R1S go on sale in late 2020, they'll start at $61,500, and $65,000 after the $7,500 IRS tax credit. (Rivian has sold no trucks to date, so vehicles from that company would still be eligible for the full electric vehicle tax credit. The full tax credit begins to phase out after a company has sold more than 200,000 electric vehicles.)
Nächste Woche soll die Geforce GTX 1660 Ti erscheinen, welche zwar Nvidias Turing-Architektur, aber keine RT- oder Tensor-Cores nutzen soll. Dafür scheint der Grafikchip aber ziemlich viel Platz zu belegen. (Nvidia Turing, Grafikhardware)
Nächste Woche soll die Geforce GTX 1660 Ti erscheinen, welche zwar Nvidias Turing-Architektur, aber keine RT- oder Tensor-Cores nutzen soll. Dafür scheint der Grafikchip aber ziemlich viel Platz zu belegen. (Nvidia Turing, Grafikhardware)
Bisher verkauft Intel die Coffee Lake Refresh genannten Octacores nur für Desktop-Systeme, in einigen Wochen wird sich das ändern: Der Hersteller arbeitet an 45-Watt-Chips mit acht Kernen für unterwegs. (Intel Coffee Lake, Prozessor)
Bisher verkauft Intel die Coffee Lake Refresh genannten Octacores nur für Desktop-Systeme, in einigen Wochen wird sich das ändern: Der Hersteller arbeitet an 45-Watt-Chips mit acht Kernen für unterwegs. (Intel Coffee Lake, Prozessor)
Nach Kritik an Deep Learning Supersampling hat sich Nvidia geäußert: In Battlefield 5 und Metro Exodus sollen Updates die Qualität der Kantenglättung erhöhen, die bisher vor allem in 1440p und 1080p nicht überzeugt. (Nvidia Turing, 3DMark)
Nach Kritik an Deep Learning Supersampling hat sich Nvidia geäußert: In Battlefield 5 und Metro Exodus sollen Updates die Qualität der Kantenglättung erhöhen, die bisher vor allem in 1440p und 1080p nicht überzeugt. (Nvidia Turing, 3DMark)
The entertainment industries regularly warn the public at large that pirate sites are riddled with malware and viruses, posing a threat to unwitting visitors.
Nächste Woche soll die Geforce GTX 1660 Ti erscheinen, welche zwar Nvidias Turing-Architektur, aber keine RT- oder Tensor-Cores nutzen soll. Dafür scheint der Grafikchip aber ziemlich viel Platz zu belegen. (
Bisher verkauft Intel die Coffee Lake Refresh genannten Octacores nur für Desktop-Systeme, in einigen Wochen wird sich das ändern: Der Hersteller arbeitet an 45-Watt-Chips mit acht Kernen für unterwegs. (
Nach Kritik an Deep Learning Supersampling hat sich Nvidia geäußert: In Battlefield 5 und Metro Exodus sollen Updates die Qualität der Kantenglättung erhöhen, die bisher vor allem in 1440p und 1080p nicht überzeugt. (
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