Month: August 2021

Enlarge / On Friday afternoon, Coinbase sent email and SMS text messages to 125,000 customers, erroneously telling them that their 2FA settings had been changed. (credit: SOPA Images)

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase sent an automated message to a large number of its customers on Friday, saying "your 2-step verification settings have been changed." Unfortunately, the message was sent in error—by Coinbase's count, 125,000 of those messages were sent (via email and SMS text) to customers whose 2FA settings had not changed.

According to Coinbase's own acknowledgment Saturday, its system began sending the erroneous messages at 1:45PM Pacific time on Friday, and kept sending them until the error was mitigated at 3:07PM.

In that Twitter thread, Coinbase acknowledges the mistaken 2FA messages' potential for confusion—confusion which retiree Don Pirtle told CNBC led him to panic-sell more than $60,000 of cryptocurrency. Pirtle was holding this large wallet as an investment for his grandson, so the panicked sale may have been as much blessing as curse—he now questions whether cryptocurrency was a safe investment in the first place.

Enlarge / An interdisciplinary team of roboticists, engineers and biologists modeled the mechanics of the mantis shrimp’s punch and built a robot that mimics the movement. (credit: Second Bay Studios and Roy Caldwell/Harvard SEAS)

The mantis shrimp boasts one of the most powerful, ultrafast punches in nature—it's on par with the force generated by a .22 caliber bullet. This makes the creature an attractive object of study for scientists eager to learn more about the relevant biomechanics. Among other uses, it could lead to small robots capable of equally fast, powerful movements. Now a team of Harvard University researchers have come up with a new biomechanical model for the mantis shrimp's mighty appendage, and they built a tiny robot to mimic that movement, according to a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“We are fascinated by so many remarkable behaviors we see in nature, in particular when these behaviors meet or exceed what can be achieved by human-made devices,” said senior author Robert Wood, a roboticist at Harvard University's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). “The speed and force of mantis shrimp strikes, for example, are a consequence of a complex underlying mechanism. By constructing a robotic model of a mantis shrimp striking appendage, we are able to study these mechanisms in unprecedented detail.”

Wood's research group made headlines several years ago when they constructed RoboBee, a tiny robot capable of partially untethered flight. The ultimate goal of that initiative is to build a swarm of tiny interconnected robots capable of sustained untethered flight—a significant technological challenge, given the insect-sized scale, which changes the various forces at play. In 2019, Wood's group announced their achievement of the lightest insect-scale robot so far to have achieved sustained, untethered flight—an improved version called the RoboBee X-Wing. (Kenny Breuer, writing in Nature, described it as a "a tour de force of system design and engineering.")

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

A county judge in Ohio has ordered a hospital in Cincinnati to administer ivermectin to an intensive care patient, a move raises questions about the role of the courts in the medical system.

“It is absurd that this order was issued,” Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, told Ars. “If I were these doctors, I simply wouldn’t do it.”

The order was spurred by a lawsuit filed by Julie Smith, whose 51-year-old husband, Jeffrey, is being treated in West Chester Hospital for COVID-19. The lawsuit was first reported by the Ohio Capital Journal. Jeffrey has been in the hospital since July 15, and as his condition declined, his wife Julie began investigating alternative treatments.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

A county judge in Ohio has ordered a hospital in Cincinnati to administer ivermectin to an intensive care patient, a move raises questions about the role of the courts in the medical system.

“It is absurd that this order was issued,” Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, told Ars. “If I were these doctors, I simply wouldn’t do it.”

The order was spurred by a lawsuit filed by Julie Smith, whose 51-year-old husband, Jeffrey, is being treated in West Chester Hospital for COVID-19. The lawsuit was first reported by the Ohio Capital Journal. Jeffrey has been in the hospital since July 15, and as his condition declined, his wife Julie began investigating alternative treatments.

Enlarge / LaPlace, Louisiana: Jacqueline Smith waits with her mother Lucille Matthew for transportation after they were rescued from their flooded neighborhood in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida on August 30, 2021. (credit: Getty Images | Scott Olson)

AT&T today said that only 60 percent of its network in Louisiana is working as Hurricane Ida pummels the state. T-Mobile is reporting similarly extensive outages, while Verizon says it has minimized outages with backup generators. AT&T and T-Mobile both said they have deployed additional generators but the carriers apparently didn't deploy enough to handle the widespread power outages.

"Our Louisiana wireless network is operating at 60 percent of normal and we have significant outages in New Orleans and Baton Rouge due to power outages, flooding and storm damage," AT&T said in a network-status update. "We had key network facilities go offline overnight, and while some have already been restored, some facilities remain down and are inaccessible due to flooding and storm damage."

AT&T said it has "mobilized additional disaster recovery equipment in the region to assist in the recovery and will work around the clock until service is restored." AT&T said its wireless network in Alabama is operating normally and that it's "seen only a very small wireless impact in Mississippi."