Yay Science

Electing to do Crimes

We're making continuous strides in Alzheimer's research and treatment. Also, Trump is again being investigated while fake electors are charged, email typos lead to leaked military documents, a man and his dog were save from shipwreck, and Rome was a little bit very on fire.

Endeavorance

Jul 19, 2023 — 3 min read

Making Movements in Alzheimer's Research

There's been a few leaps forward in Alzheimer's treatment research recently, with a new study finding an experimental drug can significantly reduce the early mental decline from the disease.

Notably, while this finding is even more promising than other recently approved medication, it is not a cure, and it is still only a temporary quality of life improvement. That said, research is moving forward here at an incredible clip, and this success helps inform future work and better shapes our understanding of the disease and how it can be treated.

Fuck yeah, medical science.

It's Almost Like He Did a Bunch of Crimes Very Publicly and We All Saw it Happen

Donald Trump has been notified that he is the target of an investigation into his role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election (y'know, that little thing?)

This would be the third round of indictments on him since his presidency ended, assuming he is going to be indicted in the next few days or weeks. Last time, it went from "he has been informed he is the target" to "he's been indicted" before I could finish writing this newsletter. We shall see.

Simultaneously, Michigan's AG filed felony charges for 16 people who posed as fake electors for Trump in the 2020 election. These are people who signed legal documents claiming that they were the rightful electors for the election, which is literally just not true? Like they actually thought they could just be like "nah, we've gaslit ourselves so hard that this'll work" and they signed a document saying "I swear for realsies, they voted for Trump."

Typos Lead to Leaking of Military Documents

Email is cool, right? But also like make sure you got the email address right when you send it.

The US military has a special fancy top level domain: .MIL. Similar to .COM, .NET or .ORG, .MIL is a "top level domain," something that is at the end of a website, basically.

However, there exists another top level domain: .ML, the country code domain for Mali. Country code domains are typically two letters, such as .US, .NZ or .CN.

So here's what's been goin' on: people are bad at computers. Like, unilaterally. And because people are bad at computers, they've accidentally been sending thousands of military documents to .ML email addresses rather than .MIL addresses.

So if you sent an email with some kind of super secret attachment to BigGeneralBoy@themilitary.ml, you done fucked up.

And turns out, people done fucked up over 170,000 times. But there's a catch! Turns out the .ML domain has been managed by a third party for quite some time rather than the country of Mali itself. This third party has reached out to the US and was like "uh, bro, what are you doing?". So far, no classified data has been found in the emails, but information about members of the military and contractors and whatnot is in there so STILL NOT GREAT. Also, Mali is getting control over the domain again fairly soon so uh. Whoops. lol.

The Good (ish) Ending

An Australian man and his dog were sailing from Mexico to French Polynesia when their boat was left without electronics and communications after hostile weather ravaged them.

They drifted around in the Pacific ocean for two months before finally being rescued relatively unharmed. Both of 'em! Thanks to fishing gear, rain water and partial shade from the boat canopy, the two were able to survive out at sea and are back on land recovering well.

On This day…

On this day in the year 64, the Great Fire of Rome began. It would go on to burn for about a week, destroying nearly half the city.

While accounts vary, there were rumors that the fire was ordered by Emperor Nero (big day for Nero!) to clear space for a new palace. This is not confirmed. That said, Nero does not have a long history of not doing wild shit.