Month: November 2021

Ovid's Metamorphoses speaks of the orb-weavers, said to be descendants of Arachne, a figure in Greek mythology who wove beautiful tapestries and dared to challenge Athena to a weaving contest. Angry that she could find no flaws with Arachne's work—and also because the tapestry depicted the gods in an unflattering light—Athena beat the girl with a shuttle. When Arachne hanged herself in remorse, Athena took pity and transformed the rope into a web and Arachne into a spider.

It's an apt literary allusion for a new study on how spiders weave their webs, which is no doubt why scientists at Johns Hopkins University referenced the Ovid story in a recent paper published in the journal Current Biology. The JHU team used night vision and AI to record every single movement of several hackled orb-weavers as they spun their webs. The experiment revealed that the spiders rely on a shared set of movements amounting to "a web-building playbook or algorithm" to create the elegant, geometrically precise structures—even though they have teeny-tiny brains compared to humans.

Co-author Andrew Gordus, a behavioral biologist at JHU, said that he was inspired to undertake the project while he was out birding with his son and saw an especially spectacular spider web. "I thought, 'If you went to a zoo and saw a chimpanzee building this, you'd think that's one amazing and impressive chimpanzee,'" said Gordus. "Well, this is even more amazing because a spider's brain is so tiny and I was frustrated that we didn't know more about how this remarkable behavior occurs. Now we've defined the entire choreography for web building, which has never been done for any animal architecture at this fine of a resolution."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A hacker working for a US intelligence agency breached the servers of Booking.com in 2016 and stole user data related to the Middle East, according to a book published on Thursday. The book also says the online travel agency opted to keep the incident secret.

Amsterdam-based Booking.com made the decision after calling in the Dutch intelligence service, known as AIVD, to investigate the data breach. On the advice of legal counsel, the company didn’t notify affected customers or the Dutch Data Protection Authority. The grounds: Booking.com wasn’t legally required to do so because no sensitive or financial information was accessed.

IT specialists working for Booking.com told a different story, according to the book De Machine: In de ban van Booking.com (English translation: The Machine: Under the Spell of Booking.com). The book’s authors, three journalists at the Dutch national newspaper NRC, report that the internal name for the breach was the “PIN-leak,” because the breach involved stolen PINs from reservations.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A hacker working for a US intelligence agency breached the servers of Booking.com in 2016 and stole user data related to the Middle East, according to a book published on Thursday. The book also says the online travel agency opted to keep the incident secret.

Amsterdam-based Booking.com made the decision after calling in the Dutch intelligence service, known as AIVD, to investigate the data breach. On the advice of legal counsel, the company didn’t notify affected customers or the Dutch Data Protection Authority. The grounds: Booking.com wasn’t legally required to do so because no sensitive or financial information was accessed.

IT specialists working for Booking.com told a different story, according to the book De Machine: In de ban van Booking.com (English translation: The Machine: Under the Spell of Booking.com). The book’s authors, three journalists at the Dutch national newspaper NRC, report that the internal name for the breach was the “PIN-leak,” because the breach involved stolen PINs from reservations.

Enlarge / Head of pork tapeworm. (credit: Getty | Michael J Klein)

On a night that seemed like any other, a perfectly healthy 38-year-old man in Massachusetts fell from his bed amid a violent seizure at 4 am. The commotion woke his wife, who found her husband on the floor, shaking and "speaking gibberish." He was rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital.

There, doctors witnessed the man have a two-minute-long tonic-clonic (grand mal) seizure, in which he lost consciousness and his muscles aggressively contracted. Doctors began the painstaking process of trying to piece together what was wrong by performing a battery of tests and interviewing his family.

By nearly every account, the man was in very good health. He had no history of seizures or of any cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, genitourinary, or neurologic disorders. His toxicology screens were clear. He took no medications, prescribed or over-the-counter. He didn't smoke and rarely drank. There was no evidence that anything had happened to him recently that would provoke a seizure; the man had spent the previous day with his children, then he had dinner with his brother, who reported nothing out of the ordinary. The only initial hint of the diagnosis to come was that the man had immigrated to Boston from a rural area of Guatemala about 20 years earlier.

Enlarge / Judge Bruce Schroeder reprimands Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger during cross-examination of Kyle Rittenhouse at the Kenosha County Courthouse in Wisconsin on November 10, 2021. (credit: Getty Images | Pool)

When Kenosha County prosecutor Thomas Binger cross-examined murder suspect Kyle Rittenhouse yesterday, he wanted to show Rittenhouse video on an iPad and use a touchscreen feature that phone and tablet owners around the world use every day: pinch-to-zoom.

Judge Bruce Schroeder's ruling? You shall not pinch.

Schroeder prevented Binger from pinching and zooming after Rittenhouse's defense attorney Mark Richards claimed that when a user zooms in on a video, "Apple's iPad programming creat[es] what it thinks is there, not what necessarily is there." Richards provided no evidence for this claim and admitted that he doesn't understand how the pinch-to-zoom feature works, but the judge decided the burden was on the prosecution to prove that zooming in doesn't add new images into the video.

Enlarge / Logitech's Pop Keys mechanical wireless keyboard. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Mechanical keyboards can be intimidating for newcomers. The sheer number of options—keyboard size, the type and the manufacturer of the switches, the style and material of the keycaps, among others—can make it hard to know where to start. And yet, once you do start using a mechanical keyboard, there’s a lot to love, from the excellent key travel and typing feel to the satisfying clackity-clack of the switches to the customizability of the keycaps.

As we talked about in our review of the Razer Pro Type Ultra, good wireless mechanical keyboards are still hard to come by. That’s doubly true if you’re looking for one from a more established company that can provide US-based technical and warranty support and well-maintained, actually useful software. Which is why I’m glad to see Logitech expanding its mechanical keyboard offerings with the $100 Pop Keys Bluetooth keyboard.

The Pop Keys is definitely not for everyone. Its high-contrast, high-saturation color palette, rounded typewriter-style keycaps, and dedicated emoji keys will instantly turn off people who just want a keyboard-looking keyboard. Its keycap quality leaves a bit to be desired, too. But as a starter mechanical keyboard, or as a mechanical alternative for other Logitech Bluetooth keyboards like the budget-minded K380 or the MX Keys Mini, it’s an aesthetically striking option with reliable connectivity and a decent feel.