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Enlarge / Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (credit: Getty | Chip Somodevilla /)

In an unexpected move, Marathon Pharmaceuticals announced Monday that it is pausing the roll-out of its now FDA-approved drug for Duchenne muscular dystrophy—which has an $89,000-per-year list price.

The announcement comes in the wake of intense outcry from patients, the public, and lawmakers over the drug’s eye-popping price, which Marathon announced last week.

The drug, deflazacort, is a steroid treatment that slows the progression of Duchenne, a rare, devastating neuromuscular disorder that leaves boys unable to walk by their teens. The disorder also shortens their lifespan to 25-30 years.

Enlarge / LG's 5K UltraFine display is the closest thing you can get to a modern Thunderbolt Display, or at least it was. (credit: LG)

A report from Business Insider this morning claims that Apple will no longer be selling LG's flawed 5K UltraFine Thunderbolt display in its retail stores. The retail listing in Apple's online store, Business Insider continues, would also be pulled, completely halting sales of the monitor. After conversing with Apple, we can report that this is only partially true; you won't be able to go into Apple's retail stores to buy the display for the next few weeks, but only because Apple is waiting for LG to fix the display and manufacture new ones before it resumes sales. In the meantime, interested buyers are still able to order the monitor on Apple's site.

The current estimated wait time for a fixed version of the monitor is five to six weeks. If you order before the end of March, the display still comes with the 25-percent discount Apple is offering on most USB-C and Thunderbolt dongles, cables, and accessories.

Shipments of the monitors have halted because of an EM shielding issue that caused problems when the monitors were placed within a few feet of a Wi-Fi router. LG has already acknowledged the issue and said that models manufactured after February 2017 wouldn't be affected by the defect.

Enlarge / System architecture of a cross-browser tracking system. (credit: Cao et al.)

Researchers have recently developed the first reliable technique for websites to track visitors even when they use two or more different browsers. This shatters a key defense against sites that identify visitors based on the digital fingerprint their browsers leave behind.

State-of-the-art fingerprinting techniques are highly effective at identifying users when they use browsers with default or commonly used settings. For instance, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's privacy tool, known as Panopticlick, found that only one in about 77,691 browsers had the same characteristics as the one commonly used by this reporter. Such fingerprints are the result of specific settings and customizations found in a specific browser installation, including the list of plugins, the selected time zone, whether a "do not track" option is turned on, and whether an adblocker is being used.

Until now, however, the tracking has been limited to a single browser. This constraint made it infeasible to tie, say, the fingerprint left behind by a Firefox browser to the fingerprint from a Chrome or Edge installation running on the same machine. The new technique—outlined in a research paper titled (Cross-)Browser Fingerprinting via OS and Hardware Level Features—not only works across multiple browsers. It's also more accurate than previous single-browser fingerprinting.

In 1433, artist Jan van Eyck invented an entirely new genre of painting while sitting quietly in his studio in Bruges. He did it with the help of a scientific breakthrough which allowed German engineers to create some of the world's first high-quality mirrors. The new German mirrors were made by coating glass with an amalgam of tin and mercury. Reflections in these mirrors were sharper than anything the world had ever seen, and they led to van Eyck's crazy idea to create a self-portrait.

Over the next century, as the Renaissance blossomed with experimentation in science and art in Europe, self-portraits became a kind of craze. Albrecht Dürer, artist and mathematician, is famous for a series of self-portraits he created in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. By the 19th and 20th centuries, artists like Vincent van Gogh and Frida Kahlo were creating surreal and abstract self-portraits to express intense emotions. In a sense, argues University of Bamburg cognitive scientist Claus-Christian Carbon, they were anticipating today's selfies, in which people use filters and props to convey a feeling.