arrested

After Spain's national police arrested three hackers allegedly linked to Anonymous and the Sony PlayStation Network hacks, the amorphous collective claims to have successfully taken the agency's site offline in retaliation.

According to a Saturday posting on AnonOps Communications, "Operation Policia (#OpPolicia) is the name for the successful DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack that paralyzed the Official National Police website (Página Oficial del Cuerpo Nacional de Policía www.policia.es) for hours on Saturday, making it inaccessible to visitors. The DDoS attack is a protest tactic often deployed by Anonymous."

The … Read more

Authorities in Spain say they have arrested three suspected members of the "hacktivist" collective known as Anonymous, alleging that the trio took part in the now notorious hack of Sony's PlayStation Network as well as other infiltrations of governments, banks, and other businesses.

According to a translation of a press release from Spain's national police, it also seized a server used in the attacks from the home of one of the suspects. The suspects were picked up in the cities of Barcelona, Valencia, and Almeria. Police claim they represent the organization's leadership in Spain and that they directed attacks against the country's central election board, the Catalan police and the UGT, a major Spanish trade union.

Spanish police also claim to have evidence that the group went after a number of international targets from an apartment, including "...the Web sites of the Sony Playstation Store, BBVA, Bankia, ENEL and the governments of Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Iran, Chile, Colombia and New Zealand."… Read more

Temple University physics department chair Rongjia Tao made headlines in 2008 when he developed a simple device that creates an electric field to thin fuel, thereby reducing the size of the droplets injected into the engine and improving fuel efficiency.

Now, Tao and former graduate student Ke Huang are unveiling their latest research that this same principle, when applied to the human body, can help thin blood and reduce one's risk of heart attack--without the side effects of blood thinners such as aspirin.

After testing numerous blood samples at Temple, the physicists were able to use a magnetic field of 1.3 Telsa (roughly equivalent to what is used in an MRI) for just one minute to polarize the red blood cells, which contain iron, thereby causing those cells to link together in short, streamlined chains flowing down the center of blood vessels and reducing friction along the walls.

The result: smoother blood flow. In fact, after just 1 to 12 minutes of exposure to the magnetic field via a 1,000-pound magnet, blood viscosity decreased by 20 to 30 percent for several hours. Eventually, blood viscosity returned to previous levels.… Read more

When a 54-year-old man collapsed outside a grocery store on a cold winter's night in rural Minnesota recently, a bystander and a trained first responder who happened to be nearby came together to administer CPR.

Five minutes later, paramedics arrived, continued the CPR, and over the course of the next half-hour delivered six defibrillation shocks.

Then a Mayo Clinic flight crew arrived by helicopter, and they proceeded to administer advanced CPR on the still-pulseless patient. After delivering a total of 11 shocks, the team still couldn't get a pulse, so they upped the drugs, did CPR for two more minutes, and delivered the final, twelfth shock.… Read more

Sudden death syndrome--an umbrella term for a range of heart conditions that can lead to cardiac arrest--is notorious for striking those who seem most fit.

That is because the condition, thought to be largely hereditary, is often triggered by overexertion. Tragically for some, the first symptom can be cardiac arrest.

It's possible, though costly, to screen for SDS. In fact, after soccer prodigy John Marshall died of a sudden heart attack at age 16 in 1994, the day before he was set to join Everton, testing became compulsory for professional athletes in several countries.

Good thing, especially for those who don't have the means that professional athletes do, that a doctor at Tel Aviv University may have just made testing for the condition far simpler and more affordable.

"There is such a significant overlap between what's normal and abnormal on an ECG [electrocardiogram] that we need additional screening parameters," Dr. Sami Viskin, a cardiologist at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, said yesterday in a university press release. "This test, when done on people with strong symptoms, can really give...doctors a yardstick to compare those at risk for sudden death syndrome to those who would otherwise go on to live a healthy life."

Named after the doctor, the Viskin Test is easy on the patient, who simply undergoes a baseline ECG while resting in the supine position, and is then asked to stand quickly and remain still during continuous ECG recording.… Read more

An app developed by the UK Resuscitation Council may help doctors in emergency cardiac arrest situations, according to a study in the April issue of the journal Anaesthesia.

Researchers recruited 31 doctors (average age 27.5 years) who had taken advanced life-support training in the past four years to investigate whether the free app, called iResus, can improve test scores in simulated cardiac emergencies.

The doctors were divided into two groups--those who used iResus during the simulation and those who did not. Their knowledge and skills were evaluated using the CASTest scoring system during the simulated cardiac arrest emergency.

Those … Read more

Many of us know someone who has experienced severe chest pain but hemmed and hawed over whether to go to the emergency room. The ultimate hope is that the pain will just pass.

The rule of thumb has been to just go--better safe than sorry. But only 20 percent of those who do go actually have heart attacks, so researchers at the Stanford Cardiac Rehabilitation Program have developed a 3- to 5-minute survey that can be administered by a health care professional that helps identify symptoms, level of heart attack risk, and whether a trip to the ER is necessary.… Read more

CNET has obtained a copy of the FBI's complaint against four men who had access to vital trade secrets belonging to such tech companies as Apple, Dell, and AMD, and are accused of repeatedly violating securities laws by selling this information to hedge funds, according to the FBI.

As a result of a sophisticated sting operation that involved wiretaps and recorded phone conversations, FBI agents have arrested the four men on a score of charges that include securities fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy.

The government's complaint, filed this week with U.S. District Court for the Southern District … Read more

Julian Assange, leader of the WikiLeaks project that's published extensive secret details of U.S. military and diplomatic activity, has been arrested in London on a Swedish accusation of rape.

"He is accused by the Swedish authorities of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation, and one count of rape, all alleged to have been committed in August 2010," London's Metropolitan Police said in a statement today.

Assange appeared today at Magistrates Court in the City of Westminster in London, the police said. The police's extradition unit arrested him this morning on … Read more