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For years, researchers have tracked the source of hospital outbreaks back to superbug-splashing sinks. For instance, researchers found an outbreak in a Canadian hospital that spanned 2004 to 2006 was caused by multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa breeding and splashing out of the drains of hand-wash sinks in patient areas. Thirty-six patients were infected in the outbreak, 12 of whom died of their sink-spawned infection. Investigators found that with the water running, the sinks could launch deadly germs at least a meter away.

Despite the discoveries, researchers have puzzled over how sinks become superbug spreaders—and how to keep them from doing it. In the case of the Canadian hospital outbreak, no amount of cleaning or disinfectants fixed the problem. The hospital only ended the outbreak by renovating the sinks so they weren’t so splashy.

Now, with a new study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, researchers may finally have an answer to superbugs’ sink-dwelling skills: They survive in P-traps and can quickly climb pipes. More specifically, researchers at the University of Virginia found that bacteria can happily colonize a sink’s P-trap and then sneak back up the pipe and into the drain by forming a protective, creeping film, called a biofilm, on the plumbing. Once they get to the drain, they only need a burst of water to scatter up into the sink and surrounding, touchable surfaces.

(credit: Matt Wade)

A Secret Service officer has pleaded guilty to sexting, from the White House, an undercover officer he thought was 14 years old. Lee Robert Moore, who has been terminated from his post of checking identification at the White House entrance, also admitted (PDF) to sending a minor girl sexually explicit pictures of himself and of enticing her to do the same.

According to his court admission, Moore befriended an undercover officer and other girls on a website called Meet24 and on the Kik messenger application.

According to court documents, (PDF) the defendant in 2015 told an undercover officer posing as a teen girl that he was texting her "in the break room" and that he had "to go relieve someone else to go on break."

Enlarge / The distant future. THE DISTANT FUTURE!

SAN FRANCISCO—For about a year now, Valve's SteamVR initiative has been synonymous, on the hardware side, with the HTC Vive headset and its included hand-tracking controllers. But unlike the proprietary, self-made hardware of Oculus, PlayStation VR, and the like, SteamVR provides a hardware and API standard that any manufacturer can adhere to with their own headset.

LG recently announced that it was partnering with Valve to become the first company since HTC to join the SteamVR hardware bullpen. At the Game Developers Conference this week, the Korean electronics giant showed off an early prototype headset that already shows some key improvements over the familiar Vive.

The most noticeable difference is apparent as soon as the LG headset slides over your head. The display itself is mounted on an adjustable rigid headband that wraps around the back of your skull and balances itself on the top of your forehead, much like the extremely comfortable PlayStation VR. This distributes the headset's weight much more comfortably than the small, semi-elastic fabric strap on the Vive (and the display housing itself seems much less bulky than the Vive, from a volume perspective). It also lets the display itself hover slightly in front of your face, avoiding the ski goggle-like nasal pressure and air-choking seal around the eyes of headsets like the Vive and Oculus Rift.

Science

The chance discovery of two nearly-intact crania, or skull caps, has given us a window on how Homo sapiens evolved in Asia over 100,000 years ago. Dubbed Xuchang 1 and 2, the crania are between 105,000 and 125,000 years old and have distinct shapes unlike anything seen before in the fossil record. Describing the new findings in Science, paleoanthropologist Xiu-Jie Wu and her colleagues say they've found an ancient human where the features are distinctly Neanderthal, mixed with those of a modern human.

Zhan-Yang Li, Wu's colleague at the Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing, found miraculously undamaged fragments of the two crania in Lingjing, a village in Henan, China. A spring flowed there during the Pleistocene period when these humans would have lived, and the area was full of now-extinct megafauna like Bos (aurochs, or wild cows), Megaloceros (a massive deer), and Coelodonta (a rhino), as well as elk and horses. Bones from these animals were found with Xuchang 1 and 2, along with stone tools made from quartz. It appears that Xuchang 1 and 2 were successful hunters with a rich array of foods to eat.

Enlarge / The Fermi space telescope. (credit: NASA)

High energy cosmic rays are something of a conundrum wrapped in an enigma. Essentially, they can't come from very far away and still have the energy they possess. To that end, cosmic rays should originate from within the Milky Way. Yet, they seem to be coming from every direction: no matter where you look in space, you have the same probability of seeing a high energy cosmic ray. A new paper has, to the disappointment of the 90 plus authors, confirmed this uniformity to a rather high degree.

Living in a frosted fish bowl

Let's start this with an analogy. Imagine that you are inside a frosted glass bulb. When the Sun comes up, you can see light, but it seems to come from every direction evenly. There is no way to tell that the light actually comes from a single source, shining from a single direction unless the light is sufficiently bright or the frosting on the window is not too dense. Then, even though you still see light from every direction, the slight brightness increase in one direction tells you that there is a light source in that direction.

Cosmic rays with energies up to 2TeV are thought to originate from dying supernovae in our own galaxy. Observations from the Fermi satellite have confirmed that some cosmic rays do originate in supernovae, but these observations don't seem to account for the full total of cosmic rays. (Note that there are cosmic rays at much higher energies, but these certainly do not originate within our galaxy.)

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Leon Neal)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has explained the hours-long service disruption that caused many websites and Internet-connected services to go offline earlier this week.

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team was debugging a problem in the S3 billing system on Tuesday morning when one team member "executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process," Amazon wrote in a post-mortem describing the incident. That's when things went wrong. "Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended. The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems."

An index subsystem that "manages the metadata and location information of all S3 objects in the [Virginia data center] region" was one of the two affected, Amazon wrote. "This subsystem is necessary to serve all GET, LIST, PUT, and DELETE requests. The second subsystem, the placement subsystem, manages allocation of new storage and requires the index subsystem to be functioning properly to correctly operate. The placement subsystem is used during PUT requests to allocate storage for new objects."

Enlarge / Amazon solar rooftop. (credit: Amazon)

On Tuesday, Amazon said that it would install solar panels on 15 of its fulfillment and sorting centers around the US in 2017. That may not seem like a lot, but the massive warehouses in California, New Jersey, Maryland, Nevada, and Delaware account for millions in rooftop square footage and will ultimately reflect 41 MW of installed capacity.

“Depending on the specific project, time of year, and other factors, a solar installation could generate as much as 80 percent of a single fulfillment facility’s annual energy needs,” Amazon wrote in a press release. That energy will provide electricity for everything from keeping the lights on to powering Amazon Robotics at fulfillment centers.

Amazon is finding stride with other major companies, but it's a bit short compared to some of its more ambitious peers. For example, Google announced in December that by the end of 2017 it would be using a carbon offsets program to pay for as much renewable energy as all of its data centers and offices worldwide consumed. The search giant said at the time that the move to renewable energy wasn’t just for show—it was about avoiding energy price fluctuations long term.