Month: March 2022

Enlarge / A view of the tent as the rescuers found it on February 26, 1959. The tent had been cut open from inside, and most of the skiers had fled in socks or barefoot. (credit: Public Domain)

In February 1959, nine young Russian hikers perished during a cross-country skiing trek through the northern Ural Mountains. All were very experienced, so investigators were mystified about why the hikers had cut their way out of their tent in the middle of the night and fled into the wilderness to their deaths. Last year, two scientists published their hypothesis that the group had been surprised by a sudden slab avalanche. Now, those scientists are back to address the concerns of their critics in a recent paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

The "Dyatlov Pass incident," as it came to be known, takes its name from the 23-year-old radio engineering student who organized the expedition, Igor Dyatlov. (A mountain pass near the site was named Dyatlov Pass as a memorial.) He and his fellow travelers—seven men and two women—were students at the Ural Polytechnical Institute, since renamed Ural Federal University. One member, Yuri Yudin, turned back on January 27 because his rheumatism had flared up, and the knee and joint pain was too severe to continue. He was the only one of the original 10 who survived.

According to diaries and cameras retrieved from the ill-fated campsite, the hikers began to move through the pass on the morning of February 1. Their goal was to set up camp for the night on the other side. But they lost their bearing because of snowstorms and poor visibility and ended up further west, on the eastern slope of Kholat Syakhl. Rather than backtracking to set up camp in a forested area just under a mile (about 1.5 kilometers) down, the team opted to dig a cut into the slope and pitch their tents there for the night. (Yudin speculated that Dyatlov, the team leader, likely didn't want to lose the altitude they had gained during the day.)

Enlarge / A box of Ivermectina medicine manufactured by Vitamedic in Brazil. (credit: Getty | SOPA Images)

The largest clinical trial to date on the use of the antiparasitic drug ivermectin against COVID-19 concluded that the drug is completely ineffective at treating the pandemic disease, according to results published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday.

The double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial was primarily designed to test if ivermectin could reduce the need for hospitalization among 1,358 COVID-19 patients at high risk of severe disease. Ivermectin did not, according to the international team of researchers behind the trial, dubbed TOGETHER. "We did not find a significantly or clinically meaningful lower risk of medical admission to a hospital or prolonged emergency department observation with ivermectin," the researchers reported.

The folks with TOGETHER also found that the drug failed to reduce all other secondary outcomes of COVID-19, including the time to recovery, time to viral clearance on PCR test, time spent in the hospital, the need for mechanical ventilation, the duration of mechanical ventilation, death, or the time to death. "We found no important effects of treatment with ivermectin on the secondary outcomes," the researchers wrote.

Enlarge / The Mercedes-Benz S-Class is now in its seventh generation. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

When it comes to building luxury cars, few do it better than Mercedes-Benz. The carmaker has come a long way since Carl Benz's 1886 patent and has put out a string of sedans fit for kings, kingpins, more than few dictators, and the occasional rock star. The current S-Class is the seventh sedan to bear the nameplate, and each vehicle has been more advanced and luxurious than the model that it replaced.

The W223 (as Benzophiles will know this generation) may be the flashiest S-Class to date, with big displays and a rainbow of colors on tap from the interior lighting. Yet its MBUX infotainment system allows you to control just about every function of the car without ever touching a screen, proving that sometimes technology is the answer to driver distraction. And an aero-efficient shape means the W223 is quiet and efficient, with an effective mild-hybrid system.

Mercedes isn't saying whether the W223 will be the last generation of S-Class to come with an internal combustion engine—for now, the all-electric EQS is a separate model—although the new model very well might be. We tested the $111,100 S500 4Matic: in this case, 500 refers to the capacity of each cylinder, which means you'll find a turbocharged 3.0 L inline six-cylinder engine under the hood.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Update, April 1: A spokesperson for Sen. Whitehouse has shared the full text of the letter sent to the FTC. In addition to the issues discussed below, the letter addresses whether Microsoft and Activision's actions could "amount to anticompetitive harms in our labor market, and if so, if the merger will exacerbate these problems."

"The proposed acquisition appears to be a cynical and 'opportunistic' attempt to capitalize off the systemic issues coming to light at Activision Blizzard," the letter reads.

“Massive mergers have a way of leaving workers’ concerns on the cutting room floor," Sen. Whitehouse said in a statement provided to Ars. "We need to guarantee accountability for tech employees—and employees everywhere—who’ve sustained serious abuse at the hands of their employers. I hope the FTC takes a careful look at this deal with an eye toward that accountability.”

Enlarge / A Viasat internet satellite dish in the yard of a house in Madison, Virginia. (credit: Getty Images)

Viasat, the high-speed satellite broadband provider whose modems were knocked out in Ukraine and other parts of Europe earlier this month, has confirmed third-party researchers' theory that new wiper malware with possible ties to the Russian government was responsible.

In a report published Thursday, researchers at SentinelOne said they uncovered the new modem wiper and named it AcidRain. They said it shared multiple technical similarities to parts of VPNFilter, a piece of malware that infected more than 500,000 home and small office modems om the US. Multiple US government agencies—first the FBI and later US agencies including the National Security Agency—have all attributed the modem malware to Russian state threat actors.

Enter ukrop

SentinelOne researchers Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade and Max van Amerongen posited from the name "ukrop" for one of the AcidRain source binaries and other clues, that it was used in a cyberattack that sabotaged thousands of modems used by Viasat customers.