Month: December 2022

Enlarge / Many concepts are static models, but Mercedes-Benz built one that works. At low speed, anyway. (credit: Mercedes-Benz)

When you think of the future of transportation, you probably don’t think of water dragons like those in director James Cameron’s newest Avatar movie, Avatar: The Way of Water, which will be released on December 16. You might think of something more along the lines of the Mercedes-AVTR, which Mercedes debuted just before the pandemic at CES in 2020.

The collaboration between the producers and directors of the newest Avatar movie and the automobile company may seem like an unlikely one—after all, there are no cars in the movie, and the Vision AVTR does not appear on-screen. Yet, after spending an afternoon driving this out-of-this-world concept and getting a behind-the-scenes look at the new movie, it makes pretty good sense.

"Avatar as a movie as an IP across all the things we do, has something that a lot of movies don't have, which is an ethos," Jon Landau, COO of Lightstorm Entertainment and Academy Award-winning producer of Avatar, said via video conference at the event we attended in Manhattan Beach, California.

Enlarge / This Sponsian gold coin, circa 260-c.270 CE, was part of a cache discovered in Transylvania in 1713. (credit: The Hunterian, University of Glasgow)

In 1713, a cache of Roman coins was discovered in Transylvania, several of which bore the portrait and name of Sponsian—but there are no historical records of a Roman emperor with that name. The coins largely have been dismissed as forgeries for more than a century, but a re-analysis using a variety of physics-based methods has yielded evidence that they might be authentic, according to a recent paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. So Sponsian may have been a real emperor after all.

One of the Sponsian coins is now in the Brukenthal National Museum in Sibiu, Romania; another is part of the Hunterian collection at the University of Glasgow. "This has been a really exciting project for the Hunterian and we’re delighted that our findings have inspired collaborative research with museum colleagues in Romania," said co-author Jesper Ericsson, curator of numismatics at the Hunterian. "Not only do we hope that this encourages further debate about Sponsian as a historical figure, but also the investigation of coins relating to him held in other museums across Europe."

Sponsian (or Sponsianus) seems to have been an obscure Roman military commander in the Roman province of Dacia, an isolated gold mining outpost that overlaps with modern-day Romania. Per the authors, he was most likely active during a critical period of unrest during the 3rd century CE. After the assassination of Emperor Severus Alexander—by his own troops, no less— the Roman Empire was besieged by barbarian invasions, peasant rebellions, civil wars, a pandemic (the Plague of Cyprian), and the rise of multiple usurpers vying for power. Due to the resulting currency debasement and economic collapse, by the 260s, there were three competing states: the Gallic Empire, the Palmyrene Empire, and the Italy-centric Roman Empire caught between them. Things didn't stabilize politically until Diocletian rose to power and restructure the imperial government in 284.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Over the past year, a flurry of destructive wiper malware from no fewer than nine families has appeared. In the past week, researchers cataloged at least two more, both exhibiting advanced codebases designed to inflict maximum damage.

On Monday, researchers from Check Point Research published details of Azov, a previously unseen piece of malware that the company described as an “effective, fast, and unfortunately unrecoverable data wiper.” Files are wiped in blocks of 666 bytes by overwriting them with random data, leaving an identically sized block intact, and so on. The malware uses the uninitialized local variable char buffer[666].

Script kiddies need not apply

After permanently destroying data on infected machines, Azov displays a note written in the style of a ransomware announcement. The note echoes Kremlin talking points regarding Russia’s war on Ukraine, including the threat of nuclear strikes. The note from one of two samples Check Point recovered falsely attributes the words to a well-known malware analyst from Poland.

Enlarge / Commuters in a subway in New York on October 25, 2022. (credit: Getty | Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto)

Health officials and experts are renewing calls for masking as respiratory illnesses surge and Americans prepare for holidays.

RSV infections in children appear to be cresting nationally after overwhelming children's hospitals for weeks, but they remain unseasonably high. Influenza-like illnesses also remain extremely high for this point in the year, with flu-like illnesses accounting for more than 1 in 13 visits to the doctor's office and hospitalizations continuing to rise. Respiratory infection transmission is high or very high in 42 states.

COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, meanwhile, are on the rise, signaling the potential start of a much-dreaded winter wave. According to data tracking by The New York Times, cases are up 56 percent over the last two weeks and hospitalizations, which typically lag behind case rises, are up 28 percent. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is reporting that about 9 percent of US counties have high COVID-19 Community Levels, which are based on case numbers and hospital capacity. An additional 35 percent of US counties reportedly have medium community levels.