Month: December 2022

Enlarge / This photomicrograph depicts a close view of the posterior end of a Wuchereria bancrofti microfilaria, a leading cause for human lymphatic filariasis. (credit: CDC/ Dr. Mae Melvin)

When parasitic worms make it into a scrotum, they have a ball—and dance like nobody's watching.

But in a hospital in New Delhi, India, doctors were watching. And they caught the dangling disco on film, down to their lymphatic limbo line, according to a short report appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine this week.

The parasitic worms in this case were Wuchereria bancrofti, which are spread by mosquitoes in some tropic and subtropical areas of Asia, Africa, the Western Pacific, the Caribbean, and South America. The wriggling ravers stream through the human lymphatic system. Adult worms can live for five to seven years and, when they mate, can produce millions of boogying babies, called microfilariae. Together, they cause a disease called lymphatic filariasis that can lead to tissue swelling (lymphedema), elephantiasis, and, in men, swelling of the scrotum.

Enlarge (credit: VIEW press / Contributor | Corbis News)

In photos taken before and after Twitter’s mass layoffs, it appeared to many that Musk’s widespread staff cuts severely reduced the number of women on Twitter staff. Now, women laid off by Twitter have filed a class-action lawsuit, alleging that Musk violated employment laws by discharging significantly more women than men.

“Women at Twitter never had a decent shot at being treated fairly once Elon Musk decided to buy the company,” the attorney representing women suing, Shannon Liss-Riordan, said in a press statement provided to Ars. “Instead, they had targets on their backs and regardless of their talent and contributions, they were at greater risk of losing their jobs than men.”

Lead plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit are Miami-based Carolina Bernal Strifling, who worked at Twitter for seven years, and California-based Willow Wren Turkal, an engineer who joined Twitter in 2021 after four years at Facebook and LinkedIn. They’re suing Twitter “on their own behalf and on behalf of other female Twitter employees across the country who have been discharged or constructively discharged from their jobs during the chaotic weeks since multi-billionaire Elon Musk purchased the company.”

Back in 1997, Microsoft's then-CTO, Nathan P. Myhrvold, made headlines when his computer simulations suggested that the enormous tails of sauropods—specifically Apatosaurus—could crack like a bullwhip and break the sound barrier, producing a sonic boom. Paleontologists deemed it an intriguing possibility, although several were skeptical. Now a fresh team of scientists has tackled the issue and built its own simulated model of an Apatosaurus tail. They found no evidence of a sonic boom, according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. In fact, the maximum speed possible in the new simulations was 10 times slower than the speed of sound in standard air.

While still at Microsoft in the 1990s, Myhrvold—a longtime dinosaur enthusiast—stumbled upon a book by zoologist Robert McNeill Alexander speculating about whether the tails of certain sauropods may have been used like a bullwhip to produce a loud noise as a defensive strategy, a mating call, or other purpose. The structure somewhat resembles a bullwhip, in that each successive vertebra in the tail is roughly 6 percent smaller than its predecessor. It was already well-known in physics circles that the crack of a whip is due to a shock wave, or sonic boom, arising from the speed of the thin tip breaking through the sound barrier.

Myhrvold wanted to put that speculative suggestion to the test, and struck up an email correspondence with paleontologist Philip J. Currie, now at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. (Fun fact: Currie was one of the inspirations for the Alan Grant character in Jurassic Park.) The two men analyzed fossils, developed computer models, and conducted several computer simulations to test the biomechanics of the sauropod's tail. They also compared those simulations to the mechanics of whips.

Enlarge / Taking a close look... (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

The Federal Trade Commission has filed a lawsuit seeking to block the proposed $69 billion merger between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard. By a 3–1 vote, the regulatory commissioners approved the filing of a suit that argues such a merger "would enable Microsoft to suppress competitors to its Xbox gaming consoles and its rapidly growing subscription content and cloud-gaming business," according to a press release.

The FTC's lawsuit specifically calls out Microsoft's previous acquisition of Bethesda Softworks parent company Zenimax as part of a "record of acquiring and using valuable gaming content to suppress competition from rival consoles." The decision to make Bethesda's upcoming Starfield and Redfall exclusive to Microsoft platforms came "despite assurances [Microsoft] had given to European antitrust authorities that it had no incentive to withhold games from rival consoles," according to the FTC.

Microsoft has taken pains to suggest that the Activision Blizzard acquisition would be different on this score, promising to ship Activision's best-selling Call of Duty franchise on competing PlayStation platforms "as long as there's a PlayStation to ship to." And just yesterday Microsoft announced it had reached deals with Nintendo and Valve to guarantee Call of Duty on those companies' platforms for at least 10 years.

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  From left to right and largest to smallest: GeForce RTX 4080 (which is the same physical size as the RTX 4090), Radeon RX 7900 XTX, and Radeon RX 7900 XT. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

AMD's next-generation Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT graphics cards launch next week on December 13. Powered by the chiplet-based RDNA3 architecture, these $999 and $899 GPUs will compete with Nvidia's $1,200-and-up RTX 4000-series and will attempt to address some of the shortcomings of the outgoing RX 6000-series (lackluster real-time raytracing performance, for one).

One thing you'll notice about the cards—and one that may please people building in smaller cases—is that the cards are considerably smaller than current RTX 4080 and 4090 GPUs, and they don't use the 12VHPWR connector that has given Nvidia some trouble.

The RX 7900 series still uses 8-pin power connectors, the same as older GPUs. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

We can't say anything about whether the cards' performance is larger or smaller than the RTX 4080's until our review runs next week. But in the meantime, we can show you that the 7900 XTX (and the even smaller 7900 XT) are next-gen GPUs that will fit into most of the same cases as current-gen GPUs.

Enlarge / The Waze user icons. We feel for ya, little blue Waze icon above the “W. (credit: Waze)

Is Waze in trouble at Google? The Wall Street Journal broke the news last night that Google is merging the 500-person Waze team into Google's "Geo" division, aka Google Maps. Waze's current CEO, Neha Parikh—who has only been at the helm since 2021 after the long-term CEO, Noam Bardin, quit Google—will step down after a transition period. Under Maps, Waze won't have a CEO.

The Waze merger comes as part of Google CEO Sundar Pichai's cost-cutting mission over the last few months, which has so far killed Google Stadia, Project Loon, half of Area 120, and the Pixel laptop division and might even be coming for the (poorly monetized) Google Assistant. The report says that "Google expects the restructuring to reduce overlapping mapmaking work across the Waze and Maps products."

Waze is a mapping application that has miles of overlap with Google Maps. You can view a world map, navigate places, look up points of interest, and see traffic data. Waze's defining feature is crowdsourced reporting of road hazards—things like traffic, speed traps, construction—that will instantly show up for other Waze users. Google bought Waze in 2013, and while it quickly moved to integrate traffic reports, it doesn't show all the Waze reports and doesn't push users to report road hazards the way Waze does.

Enlarge / APT37, a group believed to be backed by the North Korean government, has found success exploiting the bits of Internet Explorer still present in various Windows-based apps. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Microsoft's Edge browser has replaced Internet Explorer in almost every regard, but some exceptions remain. One of those, deep inside Microsoft Word, was exploited by a North-Korean-backed group this fall, Google security researchers claim.

It's not the first time the government-backed APT37 has utilized Internet Explorer's lingering presence, as Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) notes in a blog post. APT37 has had repeated success targeting South Korean journalists and activists, plus North Korean defectors, through a limited but still successful Internet Explorer pathway.

The last exploit targeted those heading to Daily NK, a South Korean site dedicated to North Korean news. This one involved the Halloween crowd crush in Itaewon, which killed at least 151 people. A Microsoft Word .docx document, named as if it were timed and dated less than two days after the incident and labeled "accident response situation," started circulating. South Korean users began submitting the document to the Google-owned VirusTotal, where it was flagged with CVE-2017-0199, a long-known vulnerability in Word and WordPad.

Enlarge / APT37, a group believed to be backed by the North Korean government, has found success exploiting the bits of Internet Explorer still present in various Windows-based apps. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Microsoft's Edge browser has replaced Internet Explorer in almost every regard, but some exceptions remain. One of those, deep inside Microsoft Word, was exploited by a North-Korean-backed group this fall, Google security researchers claim.

It's not the first time the government-backed APT37 has utilized Internet Explorer's lingering presence, as Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) notes in a blog post. APT37 has had repeated success targeting South Korean journalists and activists, plus North Korean defectors, through a limited but still successful Internet Explorer pathway.

The last exploit targeted those heading to Daily NK, a South Korean site dedicated to North Korean news. This one involved the Halloween crowd crush in Itaewon, which killed at least 151 people. A Microsoft Word .docx document, named as if it were timed and dated less than two days after the incident and labeled "accident response situation," started circulating. South Korean users began submitting the document to the Google-owned VirusTotal, where it was flagged with CVE-2017-0199, a long-known vulnerability in Word and WordPad.