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Wildlife officials in Peru are investigating the mass death of thousands of rare frogs near the Bolivian border. Locals estimate that the bodies of some 10,000 Titicaca water frogs have been found in Lake Titicaca and its adjoining rivers. The critically endangered amphibian, known as the ‘scrotum frog’ due to its unfortunate appearance, is believed to have been killed by polluted waters. Thousands of the large, wrinkly green frogs have been found floating on the surface of the Coata river in southern Peru in recent days, prompting the National Forestry and Wildlife Service (Serfor) to launch an investigation.

A team of researchers from Florida State University, Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health has found existing drug compounds that can both stop Zika from replicating in the body and from damaging the crucial fetal brain cells that lead to birth defects in newborns. One of the drugs is already on the market as a treatment for tapeworm. "We focused on compounds that have the shortest path to clinical use," said FSU Professor of Biological Science Hengli Tang. "This is a first step toward a therapeutic that can stop transmission of this disease." Tang, along with Johns...

A Dog's Purpose is a real movie, but the website is infected. The trailer is on YouTube, just do not go to the website.

Just observed a vehicle with bright flashing yellow lights proceeding at about 5 mph spraying a fog or mist at about a 45 degree up angle on my street at 1:41 am. Spray mist went up about 8-9 feet above ground level. I listen to the local news extensively and there has not been any mention of this activity on any radio station in any form.

Florida AG Shuts Down Boynton Beach Tech Support Scam August 24, 2016 11:12 AM TALLAHASSEE (CBSMiami) – A Boynton Beach tech support company which reportedly scammed its customers out of $25 million has been temporarily shut down again by court order, according to Florida’s Attorney General’s Office. The company Client Care Experts, formerly known as First Choice Tech Support, LLC, is owned by CEO Michael Seward and his partner Kevin McCormick. The state’s Attorney General’s Office said the operation was run out of a boiler room in Boynton Beach and employed more than 200 telemarketers at the location. The court...

Concerns over the Zika virus have focused on pregnant women due to mounting evidence that it causes brain abnormalities in developing fetuses. However, new research in mice from scientists at The Rockefeller University and La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology suggests that certain adult brain cells may be vulnerable to infection as well. Among these are populations of cells that serve to replace lost or damaged neurons throughout adulthood, and are also thought to be critical to learning and memory. "This is the first study looking at the effect of Zika infection on the adult brain," says Joseph Gleeson,...

Cybercriminals are using a non-existent video that claims to show Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton exchanging money with an Islamic State (IS) leader to distribute malicious spam emails. The email’s subject announces “Clinton Deal IS Leader caught on Video”. There is no video in the email which contains Adwind cross-platform remote access Trojan, global cyber security leader Symantec alerted on Thursday. The email also discusses voting and asks recipients to “decide on who to vote [for]” after watching the non-existent clip. The spam email signs off with the name of an unknown group called “Lets Save America” and a...

Military conventional wisdom, in addition to ACSH President (and former Army officer) Hank Campbell, likes to remind us, “Governments are always fighting the last war.” They have a good point. Fifteen years after 9/11, we still ban non-ticketed passengers from entering airport terminals. Ten years after a failed attack in 2006, we cannot bring more than 3.4 oz of liquids onto an airplane, a policy that has resulted in TSA confiscating gigantic piles of 4-oz cups of applesauce. We continue to remove our shoes 15 years after the Shoe Bomber, but thankfully the Underwear Bomber didn’t provoke a similar “remove...

Areas of Miami, Florida, are now being sprayed with the insecticide naled in an attempt to eradicate the Aedes aegypti mosquito — carrier of the zika virus. Naled, a potent neurotoxin that kills mosquitoes on contact, is perfectly safe, or so the Environmental Protection Agency insists, despite Puerto Rico’s rejection of its use to combat the spread of zika there — due to concerns about its safety. To keep naled airborne where it would be most effective, the agent is sprayed in very fine aerosol droplets — about two tablespoons can be dispersed to cover an area the equivalent of...

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A Utah man who became the first person in the continental U.S. to die after being infected with the Zika virus passed it to a caregiver, creating a medical mystery about how it spread between them, health officials said Monday. The two people did not have sexual contact and the type of mosquito that mainly spreads the virus is not found in the high-altitude area where they live, the Salt Lake County Health Department said. The caregiver is a "family contact," but officials did not give further details, including how the virus was transmitted. "Our...

Brazil's microcephaly epidemic continues to pose a mystery...if Zika is the culprit, why are there no similar epidemics in other countries also hit hard by the virus? In Brazil, the microcephaly rate soared with more than 1,500 confirmed cases. But in Colombia, a recent study of nearly 12,000 pregnant women infected with Zika found zero microcephaly cases. If Zika is to blame for microcephaly, where are the missing cases? Perhaps there is another reason for the epidemic in Brazil. According to a new report by the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), the number of missing cases in Colombia and...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday that it is monitoring 320 U.S. pregnant women with laboratory evidence of Zika virus infection, up from 287 women a week earlier. However, the number of babies born in the United States with birth defects linked to Zika infection in mothers during pregnancy, or lost pregnancies linked to the virus, remained unchanged from last week's report at 7 and 5, respectively, according to a CDC registry created last month. The registry compiles poor outcomes of pregnancies with laboratory evidence of possible Zika virus infection in the...

Scientists have discovered a mcr-1 "superbug" gene in a sample of E.coli bacteria from a New York patient, making it the second reported case of superbug infection in the United States.According to a report from Reuters, the discovery was made after the researchers analyzed 13,525 Escherichia coli and 7,481 Klebsiella pneumoniae strains from patients collected last year as part of the global effort called the SENTRY Antimicrobial Surveillance Program. These patients came from hospitals in the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America, Europe and North America. Out of the thousands of analyzed strains, about 1.9 percent or 390 were resistant to colistin,...

Online backup company Carbonite is the latest firm to have issued a warning that hackers are attempting to break into its users accounts, and are prompting all users to change their passwords as a result. An email has been sent to Carbonite users explaining that the attackers are thought to be using passwords gleaned from other recent mega-breaches. ... Nobody is keen for a hacker to break into their online accounts, but it's especially important when what's being protected by your account is your computer backup. If a hacker were able to gain access to your online backup they could...

Security researchers have uncovered new malware targeting industrial control systems that uses similar techniques to those employed by the infamous Stuxnet worm. Infosec firm FireEye today published a report on the 'Irongate' malware it discovered at the end of last year. The researchers found the malware within the database of the Google-owned VirusTotal website, which allows users and security researchers to submit suspicious files for scanning by antivirus software. Two samples of Irongate had been uploaded in 2014 by different sources, the researchers said, but had not been flagged as malicious by any antivirus vendors' scanners. FireEye only discovered the...

A flesh-eating tropical disease is ravaging the war-torn Middle East, after Islamic State destruction created the ideal breeding conditions.

I am no radical but I signed it....

On 21 January 2016, the National IHR Focal Point of Angola notified WHO of an outbreak of yellow fever (YF). The first case with onset date on 5 December 2015 was identified in Viana municipality, Luanda province. As of 7 April 2016, a total of 1,708 suspected cases, including 238 deaths (CFR: 13.9%), had been reported from 16 of the country’s 18 provinces. >snip< A total of 581 cases have been laboratory confirmed in 59 districts of 12 provinces. >snip< The risk of spread to other provinces and to neighbouring countries remains very high. Transmission of the disease is no...

A new study has found that almost half the people who pick up a USB stick they happen across in a parking lot plug said drives into their PCs.Researchers from Google, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Michigan, spread 297 USB drives around the Urbana-Champaign campus. They found that 48 percent of the drives were picked up and plugged into a computer, some within minutes of being dropped. "The security community has long held the belief that users can be socially engineered into picking up and plugging in seemingly lost USB flash drives they find," the researchers...

Symptoms Most people infected with Zika virus won’t even know they have the disease because they won’t have symptoms. The most common symptoms of Zika are fever, rash, joint pain, or conjunctivitis (red eyes). Other common symptoms include muscle pain and headache. The incubation period (the time from exposure to symptoms) for Zika virus disease is not known, but is likely to be a few days to a week. See your healthcare provider if you are pregnant and develop a fever, rash, joint pain, or red eyes within 2 weeks after traveling to a place where Zika has been reported....