- He’s not all bad: Helldivers 2’s D&D-style game master Joel joins a player’s game, drops an unreleased vehicle, and then vanishes into the night Gamesradar
- Don’t be fooled by a fake Joel: Helldivers 2’s game master probably didn’t drop an unreleased vehicle into a random player’s game, but someone did PC Gamer
- Helldivers 2 APC video surfaces, showing Joel personally delivering the unreleased vehicle Rock Paper Shotgun
- Helldivers are Currently in the “Find Out” Stage of Taunting the GM BoLS
- “Please take this”: Is He Actually on Our Side? Helldivers 2’s Joel is Making Friends and Dropping All Sorts in a Recent Appearance In-Game FandomWire
Tag Archives: vanishes
Woman vanishes after calling 911 to report child on side of Alabama freeway – CBS News
- Woman vanishes after calling 911 to report child on side of Alabama freeway CBS News
- An Alabama woman is missing after stopping to help a toddler she saw walking on the interstate, police say CNN
- Woman stops for toddler along Alabama interstate, vanishes without a trace | FOX 5 News FOX 5 Atlanta
- Aniah Blanchard’s mother aids in Carlee Russell search, knows ‘the pain they’re going through’ AL.com
- Cops Search for Woman Who Vanished After Stopping to Help Child Walking Alone Along Highway The Daily Beast
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Seattle woman vanishes after Mariners game, man arrested and son attacked by stranger at 2 a.m., source says – FOX 13 Seattle
- Seattle woman vanishes after Mariners game, man arrested and son attacked by stranger at 2 a.m., source says FOX 13 Seattle
- Arrest Made in Disappearance of Woman Missing After Seattle Mariners Game PEOPLE
- Tragic Leticia Martinez update as ‘kidnap and murder’ suspect arrested after mom went missing from Seattle… The US Sun
- Investigation of missing Seattle woman last seen at Mariners game resembles 2016 murder case KING5.com
- Man arrested in connection to woman’s disappearance after Seattle Mariners game | FOX 13 Seattle FOX 13 Seattle
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Cancerous tumor vanishes with injection of modified herpes virus
Herpes is a curse to most — but maybe a blessing to some.
A new cancer therapy that employs a modified form of the virus to attack tumors has totally cleared a London man’s cancer of the salivary glands.
The drug, called RP2, was proven to have promising effects in early clinical trials overseas.
Krzysztof Wojkowski, the 39-year-old survivor, told the BBC that he was preparing to die when he heard of the experimental drug, which was available through a phase one safety trial at the Institute of Cancer Research in the UK.
He gave it a chance since his cancer continued to grow despite attempts at other treatments. Now, Wojkowski claims he’s been cancer-free for two years.
RP2 involves a weakened form of herpes simplex — the virus that causes cold sores — that has been modified to only infect tumors. Unlike other cancer drugs, it is injected directly into the tumor.
Once inside the body, the virus replicates itself until the cancer cell explodes. At the same time, it also rallies the immune system to attack what’s left, according to lead researcher Kevin Harrington.
RP2 works similarly to T-Vec, which is also engineered based on the herpes simplex virus. Approved to treat advanced skin cancer in 2015, this drug includes a gene that stimulates the production of immune cells that prepares the immune system to attack.
“When we have tumors that are heavily pretreated and they respond favorably — to RP2 or T-Vec — that’s even more food for thought, in the sense that now we have tumors that were resistant to treatment and are responding,” Jonathan Zager of the Moffitt Cancer Center, who was not involved in the trial, told Insider.
While Wojkowski is living a life without cancer, other patients in the UK trial had less dramatic results. Most saw their tumors shrink and only experienced mild side effects, such as tiredness.
Three out of nine participants who were given the trial drug alone, and seven of 30 who received a combined treatment, appeared to benefit from RP2.
“We’ll see some more studies done in the very near future, and I’m excited — certainly not disheartened or skeptical,” Zager added.
Amazon buys Roomba’s maker, Bolt vanishes, and YC slims down – TechCrunch
Hello again! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly recap the top stories to cross TechCrunch dot-com over the past seven days. Want it in your inbox? Get it here.
The most read story this week is kind of a wild one: Bolt Mobility, an on-demand bike/scooter rental company co-founded by Usain Bolt, kinda just…vanished. “The departure has been abrupt,” writes Rebecca, “leaving cities with abandoned equipment, unanswered calls and emails, and lots of questions.”
other stuff
Amazon buys iRobot: Bezos wants all the things. Whole Foods! One Medical! And now…Roomba? In this latest in a series of seemingly sudden and somewhat surprising acquisitions, Amazon is dropping $1.7 billion for the company best known for its robo vacuums.
Facebook shuts down live shopping: If you use Facebook’s “live shopping” feature to sell things via stream, it might be time to find a new platform. While live streaming isn’t going away, the dedicated shopping-focused features will go dark come October.
Starbucks is getting into web3: I’d roll my eyes, but given how many people I know insist on buying a Starbucks mug from every major city they visit…
More Robinhood layoffs: Oof. Just a few months back, Robinhood cut 9% of its full-time staff; this week, the company confirmed it’s letting go of another 23%. Citing overhiring over the last few wild years, CEO Vlad Tenev writes “I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory — this is on me.”
YC gets smaller: It had to happen eventually. Y Combinator had been getting bigger and bigger with each accelerator class, peaking at an absurd 414 companies in the last batch. They’re scaling things back a bit with the next cohort — but at approximately 250 companies, it’s still relatively huge.
audio stuff
Podcasts! Get your podcasts!
This week in the world of TechCrunch podcasts, the Equity crew talked about YC’s smaller (but still pretty huge) cohort, Darrell and Becca talked about “Instagram being MySpaced by TikTok” on The TC Podcast, and Burnsy talked with Convoy co-founder Dan Lewis about the freight company’s “secret growth hack” on TechCrunch Live.
additional stuff
Glambook’s $2.5 million seed deck: Glambook recently raised millions to build what it calls “Uber for the beauty industry.” How’d they convince investors to get on board? In this latest edition of his Pitch Deck Teardown series, Haje buzzes through the deck and helps explain why certain things made the cut.
What really happens when your startup gets acquired?: There’s more to getting acquired than waiting for a bag of cash to appear on your desk. Yair Snir, VP at Dell Technologies Capital, gives us the high-level overview of the whole process, “from NDA to LOI.”
Dear Sophie: “How long am I required to stay at my current job after I get my green card?” It’s a reasonable question! Immigration attorney Sophie Alcorn weighs in.
Scientists create weird pumpkin-shaped nucleus that vanishes in nanoseconds
Physicists in Finland have created a pumpkin-shaped atomic nucleus that throws off protons in a rare kind of radioactive decay.
The nucleus, lutetium-149, has the shortest half-life of any of a group of radioactive elements called proton-emitters, according to PhysicsWorld (opens in new tab). It loses half its radioactivity (decays into other elements) in a mere 450 nanoseconds, the physicists reported March 16 in the journal Physical Review Letters (opens in new tab).
Lutetium is a rare earth element that appears in its naturally occurring form as a silvery metal with 71 protons and 71 neutrons in its nucleus. It usually occurs alongside the metallic element ytterbium in the Earth‘s crust. In the 1980s, scientists observed an isotope of lutetium – a variation of the atom with a different number of neutrons in the nucleus – known as lutetium-151, decaying and throwing off a proton from its nucleus while in its ground state. The ground state is the lowest level of energy that an atom’s electrons can have and its most stable configuration. Proton emission is rare, and lutetium-151 was the first isotope observed to emit protons while decaying in its stable ground state.
Studying proton decay allows researchers to peer inside the nucleus of an atom and understand how protons and neutrons bond together. As part of this line of research, Kalle Auranen, a postdoctoral researcher in physics at the University of Jyväskylä, and colleagues created a new isotope of lutetium, lutetium-149, which has 71 protons and 78 neutrons in its nucleus. They found that lutetium-149 was even weirder than lutetium-151 had been. For one thing, its nucleus is not a neat sphere, but rather an oblong squashed sphere that looks a bit like a pumpkin. This is known as oblate distortion, and lutetium-149 is the most distorted nucleus ever measured.
Lutetium-149’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it half-life is also significantly shorter than lutetium-151’s half-life of 80.6 milliseconds.
The researchers created the isotope by firing an isotope of nickel, nickel-58, at an isotope of ruthenium, ruthenium-96, according to PhysicsWorld. The new lutetium isotope decays to ytterbium-148, which itself does not stick around for long: It has a half-life of 250 milliseconds.
According to PhysicsWorld, it might be possible to create lutetium-148, which might last a little longer than lutetium-149.
You can read more about the new pumpkin nucleus at PhysicsWorld (opens in new tab).
Originally published on Live Science
Comet Leonard is bright and visbible this month before it vanishes forever
The comet was first discovered in January by astronomer Greg Leonard. The celestial object has likely spent the last 35,000 years traveling toward the sun, according to Sky & Telescope, and once it makes a close pass of our star on January 3, we won’t be seeing the comet again.
As the comet nears the sun, it brightens, which is why the weeks leading up to this event make the comet easier to see.
It’s also an ultrafast comet, blazing through the inner solar system at 158,084 miles per hour (71 kilometers per second), but it will still appear like a slow-moving object due to its distance from Earth, according to EarthSky.
Comet Leonard will make it closest approach to Earth on December 12, coming within 21 million miles (34 million kilometers) of our planet. Then, it will sweep by Venus on December 18. The comet will be visible in the skies of both the Northern and Southern hemispheres this month.
It’s difficult to predict how well we may be able to see a comet, but you”ll probably need binoculars to spot this one, according to NASA. Keep an eye out for an object that looks like a fuzzy star.
“In the first couple of weeks of December, Comet Leonard can be found in the east before sunrise, passing between Arcturus and the handle of the Big Dipper,” the agency shared in a post. “It approaches the horizon right around the time of its closest approach to Earth, meaning it’ll likely be brighter but more challenging to observe. It then switches over to being an evening object after around Dec. 14th, for just a little while after the Sun sets — as it begins its long haul outward from the Sun again, progressively fading in brightness.”
As comets near the sun, these giant iceballs begin to shed some of their material, which forms a halo, or coma, around the object. Dust and gas stream behind comets to form their extremely long tails. Most comets originate from the icy edge of our solar system and only become visible to us as they travel through the inner solar system, where Earth is located, during their long orbits of the sun.
It’s possible that Comet Leonard will be visible to skywatchers looking with the naked eye, but if you’re worried about missing this once-in-a-lifetime viewing experience, The Virtual Telescope Project will be sharing a livestream from its observatory in Rome.
REvil ransomware gang inexplicably vanishes from the internet
Websites and other infrastructure belonging to the cybercriminal gang, which is believed to operate from Eastern Europe or Russia, went dark on Tuesday as close observers of the group found they were unable to connect to REvil’s web page listing its victims.
Others said they were unable to connect to the sites REvil uses to communicate with victims and collect ransom payments.
“All REvil sites are down, including the payment sites and data leak site,” tweeted Lawrence Abrams, creator of the information security blog BleepingComputer. “The public ransomware gang represenative [sic], Unknown, is strangely quiet.”
The reasons for REvil’s disappearance were not immediately clear, but it follows a raft of high-profile hackings by the group that seized control of computers around the world. It also comes after President Joe Biden said he warned his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin there would be consequences if Moscow failed to address the ransomware attacks emanating from within its borders.
The Biden administration has increasingly identified ransomware as a threat to national and economic security, highlighting its potential to disrupt critical infrastructure that Americans depend on.
Ransomware works by locking down a computer network, stealing and encrypting data until victims agree to pay a fee.
Those who refuse can find their information leaked online. In recent years, ransomware gangs have gone after hospitals, universities, police departments, city governments, and a wide range of other targets.
A source familiar told CNN the House Intelligence Committee has not been briefed on what caused REvil to go dark. An aide with the Senate Intelligence Committee said “no comment” when asked if that committee had been briefed on the situation.
Over the July 4 holiday weekend, cybersecurity experts said REvil was responsible for an attack on Kaseya, an IT software company that indirectly supports countless small businesses including accounting firms, restaurants and dentists’ offices.
REvil claimed credit for the attack, demanding an eye-popping $70 million ransom to release the affected machines. US officials have also said REvil was behind the attack on JBS, one of the world’s largest meatpacking companies.
REvil has obtained $11 million from victims in the course of its operation, according to the cryptocurrency payments tracker Ransomwhere.
The group’s sudden disappearance has prompted widespread speculation about what may have occurred. Theories range from planned system downtime to a coordinated governmental strike. But at this stage, experts are still guessing. The FBI and US Cyber Command declined to comment on whether they may have been involved.
“This outage could be criminal maintenance, planned retirement, or, more likely, the result of an offensive response to the criminal enterprise — we don’t know,” said Steve Moore, chief security strategist at the cybersecurity firm Exabeam.
Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, hypothesized that western governments may be pressuring internet infrastructure companies not to complete web browser requests for REvil’s sites.
Drew Schmitt, principal threat intelligence analyst at GuidePoint Security, cautioned that while an inability to connect to REvil’s sites may be a potential indicator of law enforcement involvement, it doesn’t prove it conclusively.
“Last week REvil’s site was down for a bit as well,” he said in a statement to CNN.
REvil is among the most prolific ransomware attackers, according to the cybersecurity firm CheckPoint. In the last two months alone, REvil conducted 15 attacks per week, CheckPoint spokesman Ekram Ahmed said.
Given the attention it has generated, REvil may have voluntarily chosen to lay low for a while, Ahmed added. “We recommend not jumping to any immediate conclusions as it’s early, but REvil is, indeed, one of the most ruthless and creative ransomware gangs we’ve ever seen.”
Anne Neuberger, the top White House cyber official, was traveling with Biden on Tuesday, though her reasons for accompanying the president to Philadelphia were not clear. A White House spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.