Month: October 2022

Enlarge / Red Cross workers don PPE prior to burying a 3-year-old boy suspected of dying from Ebola in 2022 in Mubende, Uganda. (credit: Getty | Luke Dray)

Concern is rising over the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Uganda that is now swiftly spreading in the densely populated capital city of Kampala. The outbreak is caused by a lesser-seen species of Ebolavirus, the Sudan virus, for which there is no proven vaccine or treatment.

Uganda's Ministry of Health declared an outbreak on September 20, a day after a 24-year-old man from a rural area in central Uganda died of the disease. Since then, the virus has spread to seven districts in the country, with the ministry reporting a total of 109 confirmed cases and 30 deaths. Health workers accounted for 15 of the confirmed cases and six of the confirmed deaths. There are also unofficial reports of probable cases and deaths.

Health experts are particularly concerned about the spread into Kampala, which government officials reported only Sunday. As of Wednesday, the city of more than 1.6 million has seen at least 15 confirmed cases. Of the 15 cases, six are school-aged children from the same family.

Enlarge / An Open Connect Appliance server from around 2013 that a Redditor acquired. (credit: PoisonWaffle3 / Reddit)

A Reddit user named PoisonWaffe3 recently acquired a 2013-era Netflix cache server that had been pulled from service and wiped for disposal, which marks a rare occasion the public has been able to get a look at the mysterious hardware, Vice reports.

The decommissioned cache server—called an "Open Connect Appliance" (or OCA)—operated as part of Netflix's Open Connect content delivery network. Open Connect is a network of servers around the world embedded with local ISPs that contain local copies of Netflix video content, accelerating the delivery of that content to Netflix viewers by putting it as close to the viewers as possible (both geographically and from a perspective of network hops).

Netflix provides plenty of high-level documentation about Open Connect on its website, but what isn't widely known is what specific components make the Open Connect servers tick—especially one that is almost a decade old. After removing three screws, PoisonWaffle3 took a look inside their unit and discovered a "pretty standard" SuperMicro motherboard, an Intel Xeon CPU (E5 2650L v2), 64GB of DDR3 RAM, 36 7.2TB Western Digital hard disks (7,200 RPM), six 500GB Micron SSDs, a pair of 750-watt power supplies, and one quad-port 10-gigabit Ethernet NIC card. In total, the server contains "262TB of raw storage," according to PoisonWaffle3.

Enlarge / An Open Connect Appliance server from around 2013 that a Redditor acquired. (credit: PoisonWaffle3 / Reddit)

A Reddit user named PoisonWaffe3 recently acquired a 2013-era Netflix cache server that had been pulled from service and wiped for disposal, which marks a rare occasion the public has been able to get a look at the mysterious hardware, Vice reports.

The decommissioned cache server—called an "Open Connect Appliance" (or OCA)—operated as part of Netflix's Open Connect content delivery network. Open Connect is a network of servers around the world embedded with local ISPs that contain local copies of Netflix video content, accelerating the delivery of that content to Netflix viewers by putting it as close to the viewers as possible (both geographically and from a perspective of network hops).

Netflix provides plenty of high-level documentation about Open Connect on its website, but what isn't widely known is what specific components make the Open Connect servers tick—especially one that is almost a decade old. After removing three screws, PoisonWaffle3 took a look inside their unit and discovered a "pretty standard" SuperMicro motherboard, an Intel Xeon CPU (E5 2650L v2), 64GB of DDR3 RAM, 36 7.2TB Western Digital hard disks (7,200 RPM), six 500GB Micron SSDs, a pair of 750-watt power supplies, and one quad-port 10-gigabit Ethernet NIC card. In total, the server contains "262TB of raw storage," according to PoisonWaffle3.

Enlarge / The cracked terrain of Cerberus Fossae appears to be the source of most of the seismic activity on Mars. (credit: Image courtesy of ETH Zurich)

On Thursday, NASA announced that the InSight lander was continually losing power after dust coated its solar panels. The agency expects that it will probably lose contact with the lander within the next two months. But it is going out in style, as its onboard seismometer picked up the largest impacts we've observed since we put a high-resolution camera in orbit around the red planet.

Not only does the seismic data tell us a lot about the structure of Mars' crust, but it has validated a technique used to extract positional information from a single seismometer. That technique indicates that roughly half the seismic energy that InSight has picked up comes from a single location on Mars.

Impactful events

The cameras on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have been observing Mars for 16 years. Before 2021, they had not observed any impacts that formed a crater over 130 meters across. In 2021, it spotted two. One of them was not especially useful. MRO imaging didn't capture exactly when the impact occurred, and it was far enough from the site of the InSight lander that direct seismic waves ran into the planet's core, which meant that only indirect seismic energy reached the instruments on InSight.