Month: August 2021

Enlarge / A pigeon rests on a T-Mobile logo outside a mobile phone store, operated by Deutsche Telekom AG, in Munich, Germany, on Monday, Feb. 6, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

T-Mobile said on Monday that hackers breached its internal servers and that company investigators are in the process of determining if the incident involves the theft of sensitive customer data.

“We have determined that unauthorized access to some T-Mobile data occurred, however we have not yet determined that there is any personal customer data involved,” the company said in a statement. “We have been working around the clock to investigate claims being made that T-Mobile data may have been illegally accessed.”

The statement came a day after Motherboard reported that a forum post was advertising a massive trove of data for sale. The post didn’t mention T-Mobile, but the seller told the publication that data related to more than 100 million people and that it came from T-Mobile servers.

Enlarge / COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination center in Madrid on Feb. 26, 2021. (credit: Getty | NurPhoto)

Update 8/16/2021 11 pm ET: The Biden administration has decided to recommend that most Americans get a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot eight months after their initial two-dose regimen, according to a report by the New York Times. The administration could announce the decision as early as this week and begin offering the third doses as early as mid-September, two officials familiar with the decision told the Times.

Nursing home residents and frontline health workers are expected to be first in line for the extra shots, followed by older people. The administration cited the ongoing surge in COVID-19 cases and the rampant spread of the hyper-transmissible delta variant in making their decision. Officials also pointed to data from Israel suggesting that older people vaccinated with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine at the start of the year have since lost some protection against severe disease.

The original story follows.

Enlarge / Researchers have determined why droplets are propelled across a heated oily surface 100 times faster than on bare metal. The images above reveal the mechanisms that cause the rapid motion. (credit: Kripa Varanasi/MIT News)

There's a classic 2009 Mythbusters episode in which the hosts demonstrate how someone could wet their hand and dip it ever so briefly into molten lead without injury. The protective mechanism is known as the "Leidenfrost effect," and it could one day prove useful for microfluidic devices, particularly in microgravity environments, among other applications. We're one step closer to achieving those applications, thanks to new insights into the phenomenon uncovered by MIT scientists. They described their findings in a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

As we've reported previously, the Leidenfrost effect dates back to 1756. That's when German scientist Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost observed that, while water splashed onto a very hot pan sizzles and evaporates very quickly, something changes when the pan's temperature is well above water's boiling point. When that happens, Leidenfrost discovered, "gleaming drops resembling quicksilver" will form and will skitter across the surface.

In the ensuing 250 years, physicists came up with a viable explanation for why this occurs. If the surface is at least 400 degrees Fahrenheit (well above the boiling point of water), cushions of water vapor, or steam, form underneath the droplets, keeping them levitated. The droplet can skitter across the surface with very little friction. The Leidenfrost effect also works with other liquids, including oils and alcohol, but the temperature at which it manifests (the "Leidenfrost point") will be different.