Plague

Cryptocurrency has a security problem it hasn't been able to shake. Bad actors stole $1.7 billion worth of cryptocurrencies from investors last year, according to a new report from CipherTrace Cryptocurrency Intelligence published Tuesday. Of that total, roughly $1 billion was taken from exchanges. Even as prices dropped last year, crimes went up. The plunge in cryptocurrencies meant a lower total value for these stolen coins, but the volume of coins stolen in 2018 was 3.6 times higher than it was in 2017 and seven times what it was in 2016, according to the report. "These numbers only represent the loot from crypto crimes that CipherTrace can validate; we have little doubt that the true number of crypto asset losses is much larger," said Dave Jevans, CEO of CipherTrace. The report underscores massive risks in the new asset class. Aside from the reality of losing money as prices erode, the possibility of getting hacked is still one of its biggest challenges to mains...

Earlier this month, Scream Factory bulked up their Hammer library with releases of Dracula Prince of Darkness and Plague of the Zombies , and then announced they'd be soon joined by a pair of more obscure titles from the venerable studio: The Vengeance of She and The Witches , both making their Blu-ray debuts as far as I can tell. Naturally, I don't expect these titles sell as well as their big gets like the John Carpenter or George Romero films, but I sincerely hope that they move enough units to keep chasing after the rights to put out more. None of these titles are exactly the creme of the Hammer crop, but they gotta start somewhere; I mean technically their first Carpenter acquisition was Elvis (via their parent Shout! Factory), long before they got their mitts on the likes of The Thing and Halloween . Plus, Plague was a fun choice for me personally, because it was the first Hammer film I ever saw - almost twenty years ago exactly, in fact. During my freshman year Chr...

Decades later, I've made a new vow: to drop below 200 pounds and stay there. The community-wide competition Duluze was just the motivation I needed to renew my battle with the bulge. And few of us at the DNT have formed teams for the Duluze challenge and play for bragging rights, since we can't be eligible for prizes. Hey, a little peer pressure can't be a bad thing, right? My strategy isn't rocket science or the latest celebrity diet. Consume fewer calories and burn a bunch off through exercise; it's a tried-and-true formula. Nor have I gone cold turkey or exchanged my meat-eating ways for veganism. (Not that anything's wrong with that. My daughter embraces being a vegan, but I need a steak or slab of chicken every once in a while.) No more drinking calories. No longer do I start my day with a Coke and a smile. Smiles are calorie-free; Coke's are not. Light beer, anyone? Three square meals per day, for me, used to mean hitting McDonald's, KFC and T...

GBV from L to R: Kevin March, Bobby Bare Jr., Robert Pollard, Mark Shue & Doug Gillard (Tony Nelson) It's easy to take Robert Pollard, the greatest rock songwriter of the last thirty years, for granted when he's releasing multiple records a year with various projects, as he has pretty steadily since disbanding Guided By Voices the first time in 2004. So it really meant something that Space Gun was the only GBV release of 2018, and boy was it a great one—another sign that the current lineup, along with producer Travis Harrison, might be the strongest iteration of the band Pollard has ever played with. But after the relative quiet of 2018, the band is in for a huge 2019: they have three full-length releases ready to go, starting off with the 32-song double album Zeppelin Over China , which comes out this Friday —but you can listen to an exclusive early stream of it below now. It is truly an ambitious and ridiculously catchy album that seamlessly incorporates the four Ps ...

Viruses plague bacteria just as viruses like influenza plague humans. Some of the largest of these so-called bacteriophages have now been found in the human gut, where they periodically devastate bacteria just as seasonal outbreaks of flu lay humans low, according to a new study led by University of California, Berkeley, scientists. These "megaphages" -- which have genomes about 10 times larger than the average phage and twice as big as any phage previously found in humans -- were found in the human intestinal tract, but only from humans who eat a non-Western, high-fiber, low-fat diet. Tellingly, they were also found in the guts of baboons and a pig, demonstrating that phages -- which can carry genes that affect human health -- can move between humans and animals and perhaps carry disease. "Phage are well-known to carry genes that cause disease and genes that code for antibiotic resistance," said Jill Banfield, who leads the Innovative Genomics Institute's m...