Month: September 2019

Enlarge / Blizzard is back on Nintendo Switch with its colorful, popular team-based shooter Overwatch. (credit: Blizzard / Nintendo)

The latest Nintendo Direct video presentation saw the game maker deliver on a huge slew of holiday-timed announcements for first- and third-party fare. Arguably its biggest news came in the form of Overwatch, the mega-popular team-shooter game from Blizzard Entertainment. Nintendo confirmed that we can expect a Switch version of Overwatch on October 15.

Though the game's reveal footage was marked with a "not real gameplay" disclaimer, it at least included confirmation that Blizzard will lean into the Nintendo Switch's unique gyroscope options. Aiming some of the game's combat superpowers, including Junkrat's RIP-Tire attack, can be assigned to rotating the Nintendo Switch or its Joy-Con controllers (though we don't have firm confirmation that this can be disabled, if you prefer to restrict controls to joysticks). The announcement included no information about the potential for cross-play between other platforms.

As has become standard in game-announcement surprises, today's Overwatch news was spoiled by a leak. This one came from a goof-up at Amazon. As spied by the deal-hunting Twitter account Wario64 last week, the site accidentally revealed a new Switch carrying case smothered in Overwatch logos (along with a detailed zipper pull shaped like a Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controller). The accessory listing was almost immediately deleted.

Enlarge / A Tesla Model S. (credit: Mark Kauzlarich/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The National Transportation Safety Board, a federal agency tasked with investigating transportation crashes, published a preliminary report Tuesday about a January 2018 crash in Culver City, Calif. For the most part, the report confirmed what we already knew about the incident: a Tesla Model S with Autopilot engaged crashed into a fire truck at 31 miles per hour.  Thankfully, no one was seriously injured.

But near the end of its report, NTSB called Tesla out for failing to respond to a 2017 recommendation to improve its driver monitoring system.

Tesla's cars measure driver engagement by using a torque sensor to check whether the driver's hands are on the steering wheel. The NTSB criticized this approach in its 2017 report. The Culver City crash illustrates the point: before the crash, Autopilot issued four visual alerts and one audio alert over the course of a 13-minute trip. Yet the driver admitted he didn't see the firetruck.

Martin Shkreli, former CEO of Turing, mocks his way through a congressional hearing on drug pricing and later called lawmakers imbeciles. (credit: CPSAN)

The pharmaceutical industry has outdone itself.

It is now the most widely hated industry in the US, unseating the federal government as the lowest of the low, according to a new Gallup poll.

In the August 2019 poll, Americans were more than twice as likely to have a negative view of pharmaceutical companies than to have a positive view of them—that is, 58% held negative views while 27% held positive views, yielding a net-positive score of -31 points in the poll.

Enlarge / This is a screenshot from a White House briefing on Hurricane Dorian on Wednesday. (credit: White House/Twitter)

On Wednesday, as Hurricane Dorian pulled northward away from Florida, having narrowly missed the Sunshine State, President Donald Trump offered an update on the storm.

"We got lucky in Florida. Very, very lucky indeed," the president said. "We had—actually, our original chart was that it was going to be hitting Florida directly. It was going to be hitting directly and that would have affected a lot of other states. But that was the original chart. And you see it was going to hit not only Florida, but Georgia. It was going towards the Gulf. That was what was originally projected. And it took a right turn."

In the middle of this comment, Trump turned to an aide who held up an official forecast chart from the National Hurricane Center. The forecast, issued at 11am ET on Thursday, August 29, by the Miami-based institution, shows Dorian striking Florida on Monday, September 2. 

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Marilyn Nieves)

A 21-year-old Washington man has pleaded guilty to creating botnets that converted hundreds of thousands of routers, cameras, and other Internet-facing devices into money-making denial-of-service fleets that could knock out entire Web hosting companies.

Kenneth Currin Schuchman of Vancouver, Washington, admitted in federal court documents on Tuesday that he and two other co-conspirators operated Sartori and at least two other botnets that collectively enslaved more than 800,000 Internet-of-Things devices. They then used those botnets to sell denial-of-service attacks that customers could order. Last October, while on supervisory release after being indicted for those crimes, Schuchman created a new botnet and also arranged a swatting attack on one of his co-conspirators, the plea agreement, which is signed by the hacker, said.

The crime outlined in the court documents started with the advent in late 2016 of Mirai, a botnet that changed the DDoS paradigm by capitalizing on two salient features of IoT devices: their sheer numbers and their notoriously bad security. Mirai scanned the Internet for devices that were protected by an easy-to-guess default password. When the botnet found one, it corralled it into a botnet that could overwhelm even large targets with more junk traffic than they could handle.

Enlarge / The two fragments of Denisova 3's fingertip, reunited in digital form. (credit: Bennett et al. 2019)

A group of anthropologists finally put back together a Denisovan finger bone unearthed in 2009, and it pointed to something surprising. Denisovan fingers looked more like ours than like Neanderthals’, even though DNA shows that Denisovans are more closely related to Neanderthals. That suggests Neanderthals evolved subtle differences in the shape of their finger bones (phalanges) sometime after they branched off from Denisovans around 410,000 years ago.

DNA can tell us a lot about how species are related to each other, but we still need to look at the bones themselves to understand how and when particular traits changed. The combination of DNA and skeletal evidence can help us understand the details that differentiated modern humans from our nearest hominin relatives—and the environmental and other forces that shaped those differences.

The fickle fate of a finger

Back in 2010, DNA from one fragment of this finger bone (the proximal end, or the one closest to the body) revealed the existence of another hominin species that we’d been missing all this time. The Denisovans were named for Denisova Cave in Siberia, where anthropologists unearthed the bone. It’s the tip of the right pinky finger of a 13-year-old Denisovan girl who died 50,000 years ago. Her DNA sequence has become the source of most of what we now know about her enigmatic people, as fossil finds have been surprisingly rare for such a wide-ranging, long-lived species.