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(credit: Lydia Polimeni, National Institutes of Health)

President Obama released his fiscal year 2017 budget proposal today, and it's not good news for the National Institutes of Health, the country's leading funder of biomedical research. The request for the NIH will see funding levels flat for next year—but only if Congress manages to find an extra $1.8 billion for medical research. Assuming that happens, $825 million will go to the president's three big biomedical initiatives, with the bulk—$680 million—going to the cancer "moonshot."

The other $1 billion will get split between the 27 institutes and centers that make up the NIH, but that doesn't mean more money for their work. Rather, that money is necessary to fill the gaps left by an equal level of discretionary spending cuts.

This is not great news for the (shrinking) cohort of biomedical researchers out there who depend on NIH funding. The bucket of money for research project grants (grants submitted by academics to the NIH for funding) is up a little in fiscal year 2017—$18.2 billion vs $17.8 billion in fiscal year 2016. But there will be fewer awards made (9,946 vs 10,753), and they're going to be smaller on average (larger projects will soak up more of the money). None of these numbers takes inflation into account, either. NIH Director Francis Collins is fond of pointing out that the NIH's spending power was 25 percent greater in 2003 than now because of inflation.

Martin Shkreli, former CEO of Turing, mocks his way through a congressional hearing last week on drug pricing and later called lawmakers imbeciles. (credit: CPSAN)

Embattled former pharma CEO Martin Shkreli's legal troubles deepened Tuesday when the poster child for greed was sued for copyright infringement in connection to the $2 million Wu-Tang Clan hip-hop album he bought last year.

Shkreli is the founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals who became reviled for increasing the price of a life-saving drug by more than 5,000 percent last year. He also faces unrelated federal criminal charges that he allegedly defrauded investors, and he has invoked his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination before congressional panels probing the price of pharmaceuticals.

The latest brouhaha concerns his exclusive $2 million purchase of the "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin" album, the only copy Wu-Tang Clan produced. The 32 year old said he bought the album to "keep it from the people." Packaging for the album includes a 174-page book with all sorts of writings, pictures, and drawings. In that book are portraits of band members created by a New York artist named Jason Koza, who claims in a new federal lawsuit that he never authorized their reproduction.

The ice meets the sea. (credit: Matthias Braun, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany)

Even with decades of melting, much of the world's water lies trapped in ice that sits on land. If Antarctic ice melted entirely, it's estimated that ocean levels would rise by roughly 60 meters—a nearly incomprehensible figure.

But a lot of it wouldn't reach the ocean by melting. Instead, large areas of the Antarctic ice sheet sit on rock that's below sea level. Were the ocean to reach these sheets, the ice would break up and float off while melting, a process that could raise sea levels relatively suddenly. Now, researchers have performed a catalog of all of the ice that empties into the ocean in Antarctica, allowing us to identify those that pose the largest threat of rapid sea-level rise.

You can view Antarctica as having four types of ice. Inland, there are large ice sheets, some of which sit at sea level, others below. Some of the ice in these sheets flows to the coast through the exit glaciers, which often pass through narrow valleys on their way to the coast. At the coast, you'll find the third type: permanent floating ice shelves, which can extend for miles into the ocean. Beyond those, you will find seasonal ice, which expands in the southern winter but contracts again when summer arrives.

Maybe we'll be hanging out on the USS Reliant for this series. (credit: Paramount)

Ever since Paramount announced last year that it would be launching a new Star Trek TV series, rumors have swirled about what it might be like. Now we know that the show is in good hands, at least when it comes to the writing. Bryan Fuller, who also worked on Deep Space Nine and Voyager, will be taking the helm as showrunner.

Despite his long association with the Star Trek franchise, Fuller is probably best known for creating his own original visions on television in beloved cult series like Pushing Daisies and Hannibal. He has a flair for the weird, and he's drawn to stories that are driven by characters as well as gripping plots. He's currently working on a miniseries of Neil Gaiman's classic novel American Gods for Starz.

Obviously we can't get too excited until we know what Fuller has planned, but I think cautious optimism is in order. Fuller knows the Trek universe, and he's a smart writer who isn't afraid to strike out in interesting new directions.

With Windows as a Service, Microsoft has delivered a steady stream of monthly updates to Windows 10, along with a more substantial upgrade in November. The monthly updates and periodic upgrades bring with them a wide collection of security fixes, stability improvements, and new features.

Until now, however, it has been hard to know exactly what each update and upgrade contains. While security fixes were enumerated—as they have been for Patch Tuesday for many years—information about the non-security portion of the updates was scant. Microsoft's public release notes for each update package were virtually non-existent—and this in spite of the company producing internal documentation to tell its OEM partners what was changing. After pushback from IT departments and end users alike, the company announced in October that it was going to change its policy and provide some documentation of what these monthly updates actually contain.

The first set of these release notes has now been published. Windows 10 version 1511 is being updated to build 10586.104, and because of the new release notes, we know that this update includes some quality-of-life fixes and the obligatory security updates but no new features. The most notable non-security update is a fix to the Edge browser that prevents it from caching visited URLs when using InPrivate mode.

Enlarge (credit: vulnsec.com)

Camtasia, uTorrent, and a large number of other Mac apps are susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks that install malicious code, thanks to a vulnerability in Sparkle, the third-party software framework the apps use to receive updates.

The vulnerability is the result of apps that use a vulnerable version of Sparkle along with an unencrypted HTTP channel to receive data from update servers. It's the result of functions built into the WebKit rendering engine that allows JavaScript execution. As a result, attackers with the ability to manipulate the traffic passing between the end user and the server—say, an adversary on the same Wi-Fi network—can inject malicious code into the communication. A security engineer who goes by the name Radek said that the attack is viable on both the current El Capitan Mac platform and its predecessor Yosemite.

Here's a video showing a proof-of-concept attack performed against a vulnerable version of the Sequel Pro app:

Last month when Oculus announced the surprising $599 price for its Rift virtual reality headset, the company also promised upcoming bundles that would include the Rift and a PC that has been certified as "Oculus Ready." Today, Oculus revealed details of the first branded PCs in that Oculus Ready line, which will be available for pre-order starting at $1,499 when bundled with a Rift headset.

At the low end of the line, the ASUS G11CD, Alienware X51 R3, and Dell XPS 8900 SE all barely squeak by with Oculus' minimum required specs for the Rift. Those low-end Oculus Ready towers all sport an Nvidia GTX 970 graphics card, 8GB of RAM, and Intel i5 processors and sell for $1,499 to $1,599 when bundled with a Rift.

At the high end of the line, the Oculus Ready Alienware Area 51 has an Nvidia GTX 980, 16GB of RAM, and an i7 processor for a whopping $2,549 MSRP (and that's before you purchase the Rift). Asus and Alienware also offer a few Oculus Ready options somewhere in the middle of the price/power continuum.