Month: December 2020

Enlarge / The concoction featured in Road Dahl's 1981 children's book, George's Marvelous Medicine, could be harmful—even fatal—to grandmas, new BMJ study finds. (credit: YouTube/Storyvision Studios UK)

Famed children's author Roald Dahl greatly admired doctors who pioneered new medicines, and even dedicated his 1981 book, George's Marvelous Medicine—in which a young boy cooks up a potion using various ingredients around his family farm—to "doctors everywhere." Copies of the book contain a disclaimer to readers, warning them not to try to make George's concoction at home, as it could be dangerous. And now a recent paper published in the annual Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has determined just how toxic the concoction could be if ingested.

The BMJ's Christmas issue is typically more light-hearted in nature, although the journal maintains that the papers published therein still "adhere to the same high standards of novelty, methodological rigour, reporting transparency, and readability as apply in the regular issue." Past years have included papers on such topics as why 27 is not a dangerous age for musicians, and the side effects of sword swallowing, among others. The most widely read was 1999’s infamous “Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal.” (We wrote about the paper last year to mark the 20th anniversary of its publication.)

(Spoilers for the 1981 children's book below.)

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Researchers from IBM Trusteer say they’ve uncovered a massive fraud operation that used a network of mobile device emulators to drain millions of dollars from online bank accounts in a matter of days.

The scale of the operation was unlike anything the researchers have seen before. In one case, crooks used about 20 emulators to mimic more than 16,000 phones belonging to customers whose mobile bank accounts had been compromised. In a separate case, a single emulator was able to spoof more than 8,100 devices, as shown in the following image:

(credit: IBM Trusteer)

The thieves then entered usernames and passwords into banking apps running on the emulators and initiated fraudulent money orders that siphoned funds out of the compromised accounts. Emulators are used by legitimate developers and researchers to test how apps run on a variety of different mobile devices.

Enlarge / Every time we come across another cool Raspberry Pi project (like the Raspberry Shake 4D, pictured here) we're reminded of how we need to buy like 20 of these things. (credit: Mike Hotchkiss, Raspberry Shake)

“It’s the trains!” Ryan Hollister yelled to his wife Laura as he burst into their home in Turlock California. For two weeks in 2017, they’d been staring at data from their newly installed Raspberry Shake, a Raspberry Pi-powered instrument that detects how the ground moves at a specific location. Expecting to see the tell-tale wiggles of distant earthquakes, they instead saw peculiar cigar-shaped waveforms at regular intervals. “The biggest challenge,” says Laura Hollister, “was the noise.”

“I thought it was the toilet flushing or the washing machine,” says Ryan Hollister, but simple tests of going to the restroom or doing the laundry proved him wrong. While stuck in his car watching a train rattle through Turlock, he realized the three tracks that criss-cross this small California town could be causing this mystery seismic noise. As soon as he got home, he pulled up the Raspberry Shake’s data. Sure enough, each weirdly intense caterpillar of seismic waves corresponded to a train, with the highest-amplitude waves correlating with the nearest track’s schedule, only a half mile from home.

he Hollisters’ Raspberry Shake continues to record the cigar shaped signatures of the trains in Turlock, California, while also capturing far-off earthquakes, like this magnitude-7.4 event from New Zealand on June 18, 2020. The New Zealand quake is highlighted in yellow in the background, and enlarged in the inset. (credit: Ryan Hollister)

It wasn’t the last time that their seismic listening device picked up signs of human activity. As COVID-19 engulfed our world, the Hollisters, a husband-wife team of Earth science educators, noticed that their Raspberry Shake registered much lower levels of activity than usual. The drop was pronounced at times when their street, a main artery to the local high school, should have been pulsing with teenagers.