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Last week, Washington-area MedStar Health restored its systems after a ransomware attack which locked its data and systems. Considering the rising incidents of attacks on hospital systems, internet security experts and hospital officials have said that the cyberattack on the health care provider has come up as a threatening indication that an industry in competition to digitize patient records and services has encountered a new type of security threat for which it isn’t ready yet. Organizations should consider increasing their budget on security of consumer data.

A large study has reported that presently the world has more adults that can be classified as obese than underweight. Led by Imperial College London scientists, and published in The Lancet, the research has compared body mass index (BMI) in nearly 20 million adult men and women in the time period from 1975 to 2014. The researchers discovered that obesity in men has become thrice and over doubled in women.

Prof. Majid Ezzat, lead author, said that the condition is an ‘epidemic of severe obesity’ and has requested governments to take some action to deal with obesity.

Patients of ‘bubble-boy disease’ may soon have a cure as Glaxo’s potential cure has cleared one more hurdle after a European Union regulatory panel stood into its support. If approved, the treatment will help children born with the rare immune-system condition.

On Friday, an advisory committee of the European Medicines Agency showed its support for the cure, which involves introducing a new gene into the sufferer’s stem cells. Positive attitude of the committee has made path easy for the treatment. There are high chances that it will receive approval in coming months.

The new therapy will be beneficial for kids with Adenosine deaminase deficiency, also called ADA-SCID. It is a disease that targets children and takes their lives if left untreated.

Scientists likely have captured pictures of an alien Earth at an early stage. The latest photographs, captured by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, have revealed that the planet-forming disk surrounding a close by sun like star known as TW Hydrae has a gap at nearly the same distance from the star as that of between Earth and the sun.
In a statement, study lead author Sean Andrews, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), said that earlier studies using optical and radio telescopes have confirmed that the star has a well known disk with features that clearly indicate that the planets could soon start forming.

Using a sophisticated scanning technology, scientists have found what might have been the colors of the skin of an ancient snake, discovered in a colorless fossil. Preserved as a fossil, the 10-million-year-old snake doesn’t have a head. It would have been green colored along with black or brown blotches, and pale on inside.

The study, which appeared on March 31 in the journal Current Biology, reported that the description is similar to some of the present day snakes that belong to the same family.

NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity has been exploring the Red Planet for more than a decade. Like a champion, it tackled all the difficulties that it faced during its journey on the planet. But now, the rover has got stuck on a hill. NASA officials and scientists in the project have made a bold decision to make the rover climb the hill.

As per NASA report, the rover got stuck when it was exploring the slopes of ‘Marathon Valley’. The region is in Meridiani Planum of Mars. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that the Opportunity rover will attempt to climb the slope. It will be the most extreme slope the rover has faced in its more than a decade mission on the Red Planet.