Month: April 2019

MGM just dropped the first teaser for its animated reboot of The Addams Family, and it's exactly what you'd expect from the franchise—no more, no less. Do I sound a teensy bit grumpy? Chalk it up to reboot fatigue.

American cartoonist Charles Addams created the characters in 1938, originally as a series of single-panel cartoons published in The New Yorker. They were his satirical sendup of American "family values," turning the entire social framework upside down. The characters proved so popular that ABC created a 1964 live-action sitcom, The Addams Family, based on them. (Not everyone was pleased by the development. Wallace Shawn was editor of The New Yorker at the time, and his refined sensibilities were allegedly so offended by the TV series that he actually banned Addams Family cartoons from the magazine; the characters didn't return to its pages until he retired in 1987.)

Animated versions of the family have appeared regularly in film and TV since the 1970s, and Fox unsuccessfully attempted to revive the original TV series in 1998 with The New Addams Family. But it was two live-action feature films in 1991 and 1993, respectively, that defined their canonical representation in popular culture: The Addams Family and Addams Family Values.

Enlarge / A boy smiles as he gets a Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccination. (credit: Getty | Robyn Beck)

New York City officials declared a public health emergency Tuesday in parts of the Williamsburg neighborhood, where a measles outbreak has run rampant in an Orthodox Jewish community since last October—largely among unvaccinated children.

As part of the emergency declaration, any unvaccinated people living in affected zip codes who may have been exposed to the highly contagious viral illness will now be required to receive the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine or prove immunity. Violators could face a fine of $1,000, officials said.

So far, there have been 285 cases of measles in the outbreak, 246 of which were in children. Most of the children were unvaccinated or partially vaccinated. The cases led to 21 hospitalizations, including five admissions to intensive care units.

Enlarge (credit: BeeBright/Getty Images)

Mirai, the “botnet” malware that was responsible for a string of massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in 2016—including one against the website of security reporter Brian Krebs—has gotten a number of recent updates. Now, developers using the widely distributed "open" source code of the original have added a raft of new devices to their potential bot armies by compiling the code for four more microprocessors commonly used in embedded systems.

Researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 security research unit have published details of new samples of the Mirai botnet discovered in late February. The new versions of the botnet malware targeted Altera Nios II, OpenRISC, Tensilica Xtensa, and Xilinx MicroBlaze processors. These processors are used on a wide range of embedded systems, including routers, networked sensors, base band radios for cellular communications and digital signal processors.

The new variants also include a modified encryption algorithm for botnet communications and a new version of the original Mirai TCP SYN denial-of-service attack. Based on the signature of the new attack option, Unit 42 researchers were able to trace activity of the variants back as far as November 2018.

Enlarge / Who doesn't love some new Windows? (credit: Peter Bright / Flickr)

For a day or two, members of the Windows Insider Program are in that special limbo period that lets them opt out of the preview program without having to reinstall their operating system from scratch. At the same time, anyone not in the Insider Program can now get early access to the May 2019 update, build 18362.30.

For most of the year, the only way out of the Insider builds is to reinstall the previous stable Windows release. But twice each year, there's a short period where the Fast and Slow rings are shipping the same build as will be used for the stable release of the twice-annual feature updates. During this time, users of the Insider builds can drop out of the Insider program entirely or switch to the Release Preview ring, and their systems will update to the stable release and then stay on the stable track from that point onward.

Microsoft will soon close the window by distributing a build of Windows 20H1, the preview of the first 2020 update, to the Fast and Slow rings. Once this happens, dropping out of the preview scheme once again means reinstalling from scratch or waiting until 20H1's eventual stable release next year.

Enlarge / A patient wearing an electrical cap similar to the one used in the study. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

Gentle jolts of alternating current to the brain restored the waning working memories of older adults (aged 60 to 76 years old) to performance levels seen in younger adults (aged 20 to 29)—at least for a little under an hour.

The scalp-delivered electrical bursts appeared to resync brain waves across areas of the noggin important for high-level thinking and memory—the prefrontal and temporal cortex—which appeared to have fallen out of step over the years. The results, published Monday in Nature Neuroscience, support the idea that out-of-sync ripples of electrical activity from neurons firing in different areas of the brain may help spark gradual declines in working memory during aging, as well as memory deterioration associated with dementias, such as Alzheimer’s. Moreover, the finding generates some early buzz that such non-invasive brain stimulation may one day, in the distant future, be used as a therapy for such memory issues.

The authors of the study, Boston University researchers Robert Reinhart and John Nguyen, concluded that “by customizing electrical stimulation to individual network dynamics it may be possible to influence putative signatures of intra- and inter-regional functional connectivity, and rapidly boost working-memory function in older adults.”