Tuesday Wrapup

 Paradise has it's own problems.

It was a terrible sting off the coast of Hawaii that inspired Angel Yanagihara, a biology researcher, to spend her life studying the bizarre culprit. 

 Comprising some 50 species, box jellyfish are not like other jellyfish: they have 24 eyes, can move with intention and at surprising speed, and have something resembling a brain. 

They are also considered to be among the most venomous animals on Earth, killing more people every year than sharks do.

 Once inside the body, its venom acts "like buckshot" on blood cells. One species, the four-pound, nine-foot-long sea wasp, is said to have enough venom at any one time to kill ninety to one hundred and twenty humans.

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As ocean currents and biomes change, various species of dangerous box jellyfish have shown up in places where they have not recently been abundant, including Japan, India, Israel, Florida, and the Jersey Shore.

 But compared to other venoms, research on jellyfish has remained in the dark ages. New methods for collecting venom—including one that relies on beer—along with a better understanding of box-jelly biochemistry may point to better non-antibiotic protections from them, and to novel defenses for humans against other fatal infections from anthrax and the antibiotic-resistant "superbug" MRSA, says Yanagihara.

 (Venoms are already the basis of a handful of FDA-approved drugs that have generated billions for the pharma industry.) 

Now the U.S. military is helping to fund Yanagihara's research, and applying a cream she developed to thwart box jellyfish, which have already left serious stings on a dozen Army divers at a training facility in Florida, and forced one diver out of the program.

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And now for some Geek Greek...

When Apple rolled out Swift last summer, it expected its new programming language to eventually replace Objective-C, which developers have used for years to build iOS and Mac OS X apps.

 Thanks to Apple's huge developer ecosystem (and equally massive footprint in the world of consumer devices), Swift quickly became one of the most buzzed-about programming languages, as cited by sites such as Stack Overflow. 

 And now, according to new data from TIOBE Software, which keeps a regularly updated index of popular programming languages, Swift might be seriously cannibalizing Objective-C. On TIOBE's latest index, Objective-C is ranked fourteenth among programming languages, a considerable drop from its third-place spot in October 2014. Swift managed to climb from nineteenth to fifteenth during the same period. 

 "Soon after Apple announced to switch from Objective-C to Swift, Objective-C went into free fall," read TIOBE's text accompanying the data.

 "This month Objective-C dropped out of the TIOBE index top 10." How soon until Swift eclipses Objective-C entirely?

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 Those wireless security devices for homes are super vulnerable to jammers that are real cheap from China.

An anonymous reader writes with this report about just how easy it is to disrupt if not entirely kill modern consumer-grade networks -- not just Wi-Fi, but Bluetooth and Zigbee networks, too.

Crucial to determining the likelihood of any given kind of attack, though, is how much it would cost the attacker to attempt.

 The bad news for network owners and users is that it doesn't cost much at all:

 "According to Mathy Vanhoef, a PhD student at KU Leuven (Belgium), it can easily be done by using a Wi-Fi $15 dongle bought off Amazon, a Raspberry Pi board, and an amplifier that will broaden the range of the attack to some 120 meters."

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We who love the desert know enough to listen closely for (Video) certain sounds and to avoid certain things... (Dudes this video is really interesting.)

TIL of Snake Island. This island has the highest concentration of venomous snakes, travel requires approval by the Brazilian Navy, and a doctor is required to be present during any trip.

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Astronomers have spotted a strange mess of objects whirling around a distant star. Scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look.

 "I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

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Insane Fun!

Thor's Hammer

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X-Files

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Oh No!

In Back To The Future II, Marty McFly travels to 21 OCT 2015.

 As of today, we have only one week left for the franchise to feature time-travel into the future. After that, all the BTTF films will feature Marty traveling into the past from our perspective.

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 At least 21 critically wounded in two simultaneous Jerusalem attacks
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Tourist! LOL

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Baby had a very hard day
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Rare Video