Month: March 2019

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Thomas Samson)

The young son of anti-vaccine parents endured excruciating pain and spent 47 days in pediatric intensive care after contracting tetanus, a devastating bacterial infection easily prevented by vaccines.

Despite the nightmarish ordeal, his parents still refused to have him vaccinated, according to health officials in Oregon who helped treat the boy. They reported the boy’s harrowing case Friday, March 8, in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, an online publication from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The six-year-old Oregon boy contracted tetanus—also called lockjaw—innocently enough. He got a cut on his forehead while playing on his family’s farm in 2017. The boy’s wound was treated and sutured at home. Six days later, he showed signs of tetanus.

Enlarge / Edge makes it easy to break out of infinite JavaScript alert loops.

Japanese police in the city of Kariya have questioned and charged a 13-year-old female student for distributing malicious code online after she linked to the code on an online message board. The malicious code in question? An infinite loop that popped up an alert message, immediately showing a new message each time you click OK.

Those curious to see the code can see it in action here, though it's probably unwise to visit on mobile browsers, as they don't seem particularly tolerant of this kind of prank. Every mainstream desktop browser seems to handle the malicious page without incident. Edge, for example, offers a checkbox to prevent the page from being able to show subsequent dialogs, and Chrome lets you close the tab in spite of the alert box. The code itself is extraordinarily simple; it's literally nothing more than an infinite loop and an alert box that prints a kaomoji and a short message that translates as "It's no use closing it so many times."


for ( ; ; ) {
window.alert("　∧_∧　ババババ\n（ ・ω・)=つ≡つ\n（っ ≡つ=つ\n`/　　)\n(ノΠＵ\n何回閉じても無駄ですよ～ww\nm9（＾Д＾）プギャー！！\n　byソル (@0_Infinity_)")
}


Enlarge / A shortfin mako shark off the coast of Cancun, Mexico. Tiny flexible scales on its skin control flow separation as it swims, reducing pressure drag. (credit: YouTube/Guy Harvey)

Mako sharks can swim as fast as 70 to 80mph, earning them the moniker "cheetahs of the ocean." Now scientists at the University of Alabama have determined one major factor in how mako sharks are able to move so fast: the unique structure of their skin, especially around the flank and fin regions of their bodies. The team described their work at the American Physical Society's 2019 March meeting this week in Boston.

University of Alabama engineer Amy Lang conducted a series water tunnel experiments in her lab to test samples of real mako shark skin from the animal's flanks, using a technique called particle image velocimetry to measure the velocity of the water flowing over and around the skin. Anyone who has touched a shark knows the skin feels smooth if you stroke from nose to tail. Reverse the direction, however, and it feels like sandpaper. That's because of tiny translucent scales, roughly 0.2 millimeters in size, called "denticles" (because they strongly resemble teeth) all over the shark's body, especially concentrated in the animal's flanks and fins. It's like a suit of armor for sharks.

Mako sharks have evolved a distinct passive "bristling" aspect on some of their scales to swim faster. Lang's lab coordinated their project with biologists at the University of South Florida, who imaged shark skin and mapped out the scales, noting particularly how many of the scales were capable of this passive bristling and the angles at which such bristling occurs. They found that near regions like the nose, the scales aren't especially flexible, more like molars embedded in the skin. But near the flanks and fins, the scales are much more flexible.

Enlarge / A Charter Spectrum vehicle. (credit: Charter)

New York government officials still haven't followed through on a July 2018 decision to kick Charter Communications out of the state. Negotiations between Charter and the state have dragged on for months past the original deadline, and the sides say they're getting closer to an agreement that would allow Charter to remain in New York.

The state Public Service Commission (PSC) voted on July 27, 2018 to revoke its approval of Charter's 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable (TWC), after accusing Charter of failing to meet merger-related broadband expansion commitments. The PSC ordered Charter to sell the former TWC system and to file a transition plan within 60 days.

But Charter still hasn't had to file that transition plan, and may never have to, because the PSC has repeatedly granted deadline extensions while Charter negotiates with the state. Charter requested yet another extension on Tuesday this week, and the PSC granted it on Wednesday, setting a new deadline of May 3, 2019.

Enlarge / Elizabeth Warren speaking to a crowd on February 18, 2019 in Glendale, California. (credit: Getty Images | Mario Tama)

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) today proposed breaking up Amazon, Google, and Facebook as part of a plan to regulate tech platforms as utilities.

In a blog post, Warren said she'll pursue the plan if she wins the presidency. The first part of the plan is legislation that would designate the companies as "platform utilities" and break them apart "from any participant on that platform."

Warren wrote:

Enlarge / Introducing topological defects into knitted patterns can shape the (a) out-of-plane elasticity of a stuffed rabbit (left), and (b) the in-plane deformations of knitted textiles (right). (credit: Elisabetta Matsumoto)

Knitted fabrics like a scarf or socks are highly elastic, capable of stretching as much as twice their length, but individual strands of yarn hardly stretch at all. It's the way those strands form an interlocking network of stitches that give knitted fabrics their stretchiness. Physicists are trying to unlock the knitting "code"—the underlying mathematical rules that govern how different stitch combinations give rise to different properties like stretchiness—in hopes of creating new "tunable" materials whose properties can be tailored for specific purposes.

"Knitting is this incredibly complex way of converting one-dimensional yarn into complex fabric," said Elisabetta Matsumoto, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "So basically this is a type of coding." Figuring out how different stitch types determine shape and mechanical strength could help create designer materials for future technologies—everything from better materials for the aerospace industry to stretchable materials to replace torn ligaments. The models her team is developing may also be useful in improving the realistic animation of clothing and hair in video game graphics. Matsumoto described her research during the American Physical Society's 2019 March meeting taking place this week in Boston.

Knitted fabrics can technically be considered a type of metamaterial (engineered materials that get their properties not from the base materials but from their designed structures), according to Matsumoto, who points to the medieval embroidery technique known as "smocking" as an early example. From a physics standpoint, smocking uses knots to essentially convert local bending energy into bulk stretching energy.

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  Uh, I'm here to donate blood? [credit: Nathan Mattise ]

AUSTIN, Texas—The hottest ticket at South by Southwest 2019 may not involve a band or a film. Instead... it's for blood donations.

Fresh off its much hyped SXSW 2018 Westworld experience, HBO partnered up with the American Red Cross this year for "Bleed For The Throne," a blood drive held within yet another signature "immersive activation" at the festival. While people anywhere can participate in the overall Red Cross initiative, donors in Austin this week get the perk of walking through recreations of Game of Throne's King's Landing Throne Room and an exterior camp site where everyday people from Westeros await to perform and interact. According to the event press release, 80-plus actors and musicians have been hired to bring it all to life, and they're working from 100-plus pages of character script and backstory. A royal woman told us we had to listen to light inside us; a female soldier at the camp commented on the excellent mobility of our "armor"—aka, a bike helmet attached to a backpack.

If you're attending SXSW and haven't reserved a spot yet, don't bother. After a Thursday media preview, HBO PR sent out an update noting all available appointments for the weekend had been reserved within two hours of opening. On the plus side, the GoT tie-in has led to a reported 40 percent increase in new donor appointments since the campaign announcement.