Category: Uncategorised

A small company outgunned, or a case of cool-dude legal overreach? (credit: Onewheel)

During this year's CES conference in Las Vegas, some members of the press witnessed a surprising scene. US Marshals raided the booth of a Chinese company selling one-wheeled "hoverboards," packing up their merchandise and forcing them to close up shop.

The raid was prompted by legal action from Future Motion, a California startup that sells a similar looking one-wheeled "hoverboard" called the Onewheel. Future Motion says that the Chinese competitor, Changzhou First International Trade Co., was violating two of its patents. The company went to federal court and in an "ex parte" proceeding, with no opposition, asked the judge to issue a temporary restraining order. After a seven-minute hearing, the TRO was issued.

The raid produced unexpected blowback. Changzhou First didn't give in—the company lawyered up, hiring major law firm Merchant & Gould to argue its case. A hearing was set for February 19, but it won't take place. Future Motion dropped its case two weeks before the hearing.

A rendering of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, or FAST, which is now nearly complete. (credit: Chinese Academy of Sciences)

Sometimes, when we build huge telescopes to see deep into the Universe, we end up learning more about ourselves back here on Earth. That appears to be the case during the last week as two bits of telescope news came out of Hawaii and China.

First came news from the Thirty Meter Telescope project, a collaboration of international institutions led by the California Institute of Technology. The team would begin considering alternate sites for the large optical instrument it originally planned to build on Mauna Kea. The announcement followed months of delays due to protests by native Hawaiians. The protesters believe the 55-meter-tall facility would desecrate sacred ground.

Then came reports out of China that, as the country finishes building the world's largest radio telescope, it plans to move 2,029 families—a total of 9,110 people—who live near the telescope in the south-central Chinese province of Guizhou. According to Chinese officials, relocating the nearby residents will create “a sound electromagnetic wave environment” for the telescope. (Perhaps they might have considered this before choosing the site?) Residents will receive about $1,800 for housing compensation.

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, the Los Angeles hospital held hostage by crypto-ransomware, has opted to pay a ransom of 40 bitcoins—the equivalent of $17,000—to the group that locked down access to the hospital's electronic medical records system and other computer systems. The decision came 10 days after the hospital lost access to patient records.

"HPMC has restored its EMR on Monday, February 15^th," President and CEO of Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center Allen Stefanek wrote in a statement published by the hospital late Wednesday. "All clinical operations are utilizing the EMR system. All systems currently in use were cleared of the malware and thoroughly tested. We continue to work with our team of experts to understand more about this event."

The first signs of trouble at HPMC came on February 5, when hospital employees reported being unable to get onto the hospital's network. "Our IT department began an immediate investigation and determined we had been subject to a malware attack," Stefanek wrote. "The malware locked access to certain computer systems and prevented us from sharing communications electronically."

(credit: Wolfman-K)

The immune system of an adult is shaped by both genetic factors and every microbe we've ever been in contact with. The result is a unique set of things we can recognize, called an immunorepertoire. Environmental influences—things like infections and age—are thought to account for at least half of the differences in our individual immunorepertoires.

Since these nongenetic factors can, in theory, be manipulated more readily than genetic ones, it might be nice to know what they are and how precisely they impact our immune systems. A study published this week in Nature aims to look into just that.

Researchers looked at the different compositions of immune cell types in 638 healthy Caucasian Belgians ranging in age from two to 86. They found that different healthy people have a different complement of immune cells. Immature precursor cells are the most variable between individuals; while activated, mature cell types are more similar.

(credit: Matthias Töpfer)

Twitter has applied a fix to what it described as a "password recovery bug" that has exposed nearly 10,000 accounts on the microblogging site.

The company added in a blog post that the e-mail addresses and phone numbers attached to those accounts had been affected by the security flaw. It said:

We take these incidents very seriously, and we’re sorry this occurred.

Any user that we find to have exploited the bug to access another account’s information will be permanently suspended, and we will also be engaging law enforcement as appropriate so they may conduct a thorough investigation and bring charges as warranted.

In this instance, Twitter said that the security blunder had not revealed the affected users' passwords.