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Last month, Microsoft took the unprecedented step of canceling Patch Tuesday, the company's monthly release of security fixes for its large stable of software products. The move meant that customers had to wait 28 days to receive updates that fixed vulnerabilities that allowed hackers to completely hijack computers and networks.

The last-minute move was all the more unusual because Microsoft made it a few days after exploit code for a Windows 10 flaw was released into the wild. In the nine days that followed the cancellation, technical details for two more serious vulnerabilities—one in Windows and the other in the Edge and Internet Explorer browsers—were also disclosed. Microsoft's security team almost certainly knew the latter two flaws would become public knowledge because Google's Project Zero privately reported the vulnerabilities to Microsoft and the bugs were subject to Google's long-standing 90-day disclosure deadline.

Microsoft finally patched the bugs when Patch Tuesday resumed earlier this week with a release that was unusually big by historical measures. That's good, but customers had still been forced to wait 28 days to get the fixes. And, as already noted, details about at least three of them were already well-known. So far, Microsoft hasn't explained why it canceled February's releases except to say the situation was prompted by an unspecified "last-minute issue." ZDNet writer Mary Jo Foley, meanwhile, said unnamed people speculate that the cancellation was the result of a "problem with Microsoft's build system."

Enlarge / The three stooges at rest. They have no idea they're doing their part to further scientific knowledge. (credit: Elle Cayabyab Gitlin)

Ever wondered about the bacteria in your cat's gut? It's probably not something that crops up in most people's daily lives, but some of us care. The evidence for that is Kittybiome, a crowdfunding project that's trying to survey the biological diversity in cats' intestines. Suitably intrigued, and keen to do my bit, I backed the project. And that's how I came to be staking out the litter box over the summer, armed with nitrile gloves and three poop-collection kits. You know, for science.

It's all about what's known as the "microbiome"—the populations of microbes that we carry around on our skin and in our guts. Equipped with ever-cheaper and faster DNA sequencing, scientists are now able to catalogue these communities of microbes, which we are finding can have a powerful influence on health and disease. While much of the microbiome research to date has, understandably, focused on the relationship between these microbes and humans, animals have their own microbiomes. Which is where Holly Ganz and her colleagues come in; they're applying the techniques refined in humans to understand more about the cats and dogs with whom many of us share our lives.

Ganz, now founder and CEO of Animalbiome, told Ars that "It started as a citizen science project that I started with Jonathan Eisen and a couple of other researchers." She was studying the microbiome of animals at the Genome Center at UC, Davis, when she realized that getting people to contribute microbiome samples from their cats could be a fun way to get the public to participate in research. "So we did a Kickstarter, partly because academic funding is increasingly hard to obtain and partly because veterinary grants are small and hard to get."

Enlarge / Gravitational waves emerging from the simulation of two merging black holes. (credit: NASA)

Late in the 20th century, scientists discovered something amazing: gravity doesn't just suck, it also blows. This knowledge comes to us by looking at distant supernovae and determining how fast they are receding from us. It turns out that the rate at which objects are receding from us is accelerating. The Universe isn't just expanding; it is expanding faster each day.

General relativity can cope with that—sort of—by adding a cosmological constant. This constant turns up naturally from the math, but neither the math nor the physics tells us what its value should be. Explaining what this constant might mean physically also turns out to be a bit tricky. There are many models, but the big obstacle to most of them is that they don't just add a constant term to general relativity. Instead, most of them have additional physical consequences.

Now, many of these models that seemed to fit with all the data may not fit after all. That's because these models predict unreasonable gravitational wave distortions within galaxies.

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The pharmaceutical company that drew swift criticism last month for pricing an old, cheap drug at $89,000 per patient, per year has now sold the drug in a lucrative deal. The new owners say a price change is coming.

“Obviously we’re re-examining the current price... We believe a change needs to be had, but... it’s really too premature to speculate on the price level,” Stuart Peltz, CEO of the new owner, PTC Therapeutics, Inc., said on a conference call to reporters.

PTC announced Thursday that it bought the drug, deflazacort (brand named Emflaza), from Marathon Pharmaceuticals LLC. Last month, Marathon announced that it had finally gotten deflazacort approved by the FDA to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a rare, severe type of muscular dystrophy that mostly affects boys.

Enlarge / The image shows a scanning electron micrograph of 6 tardigrades in their tun state. When tardigrades dry out they retract their legs and heads within their cuticle, forming these little balls. (credit: Thomas Boothby)

One of the great mysteries of the microscopic animals known as tardigrades is their uncanny ability survive almost anything: extreme heat, extreme cold, desiccation or drying out, and even the vacuum of space. Now, we are a little closer to understanding how they do it. The key, at least for surviving desiccation, is a special protein that tardigrades use to replace the water in their bodies with a form of glass.

Tardigrades are also known as water bears, and they normally live in moist, mossy environments. But when those environments dry up, tardigrades go into a state known as "tun"—it's a kind of suspended animation, which the animals can remain in for up to 10 years. When water begins to flow again, water bears absorb it and return to life.

Tardigrades aren't the only creatures who do this. Brine shrimp and certain kinds of worms can also dry up and come to life again. But what makes tardigrades different is that they use a special kind of disordered protein, unique to these animals, to literally suspend their cells in a glasslike matrix that prevents damage.