pgmrdlm tipped us off to an unprecedented scientific phenomenon. Forbes writes: Earth's magnetic north pole has been moving East at an unusually fast pace, heading from the Canadian Arctic toward Russia. The rapid change of the magnetic poles has caused concern over navigation, GPS systems, military operations, etc. The northern magnetic pole has been drifting toward Russia at a speed of 34 miles per year (55 kilometers per year) but has slowed recently to 25 miles per year (40 kilometers per year).
Popular Mechanics writes: The magnetic poles have drifted and entirely changed places dozens of times in Earth's history, but this time it seems to be happening very fast, and within a shorter overall time interval than it did in prehistory... [S]witches happened thousands or millions of years apart and took thousands of years for the poles to physically move enough to switch. This is the first time scientists are observing drifting magnetic field activity in real time and measuring the rate of change as well.

The BBC reports: President Donald Trump has officially funded a Pentagon force focused on warfare in space -- the U.S. Space Force.

The new military service, the first in more than 70 years, falls under the U.S. Air Force.

The funding allocation was confirmed on Friday when the president signed the $738bn (£567bn) annual U.S. military budget. The launch of the Space Force will be funded by an initial $40m for its first year.
Those figures indicate that Space Force will now receive $1 out of every $18,450 in the U.S. military budget -- or .0054 percent. Here's what that looks like as a pie chart.

Newsweek's report includes the president's remarks at the signing ceremony: "That is something really incredible. It's a big moment. That's a big moment, and we're all here for it. Space. Going to be a lot of things happening in space."

The president added: "Because space is the world's newest warfighting domain. Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital. And we're leading, but we're not leading by enough. But very shortly, we'll be leading by a lot."

As noted by the BBC, the department's mission is not intended to blast troops into space, but will focus on protecting American assets like satellites from hostile attacks. The creation of the Space Force comes as China and Russia are increasingly focusing on the skies above, it noted. The Space Force website says responsibilities include "developing military space professionals, acquiring military space systems, maturing the military doctrine for space power."
In response to the news, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted "Starfleet begins."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has for the first time approved a vaccine for the prevention of the deadly Ebola virus disease. The agency announced the approval of Ervebo, a single-dose, injectable vaccine manufactured by American pharmaceutical company Merck. The announcement, made Thursday, comes a month after the European Union and the World Health Organization, the global health arm of the United Nations, both approved the Ebola vaccine.

"While the risk of Ebola virus disease in the U.S. remains low, the U.S. government remains deeply committed to fighting devastating Ebola outbreaks in Africa, including the current outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo," Anna Abram, FDA deputy commissioner for policy, legislation, and international affairs, said in a statement Thursday. "Today's approval is an important step in our continuing efforts to fight Ebola in close coordination with our partners across the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as well as our international partners, such as the World Health Organization." Congolese health officials and the WHO began using Ervebo last year as an experimental vaccine to help mitigate the epidemic. More than 258,000 people have been vaccinated in the outbreak zone so far. A second experimental vaccine, produced by Johnson & Johnson, was recently deployed in the 2-million-person city of Goma, according to Congolese health officials.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: A health-surveillance system put in place after the terrorist attacks of September 2001 has been used to pinpoint the cause of the vaping-related lung injuries that have killed 54 Americans and sent more than 2,500 people to the hospital. Using this system, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found that the lung injuries rose sharply in June of this year. Dr. Anne Schuchat, the CDC's principal deputy director, says this sharp spike strongly points to a single culprit for most of these cases: vitamin E acetate, an additive found in illicit cannabis-containing vapes. Emergency-room doctors in Wisconsin first noticed an outbreak of these lung injuries in June. They alerted state and federal health officials, who quickly started investigating the extent of the outbreak as they looked for what could be causing it.

It was important to understand the timing of the outbreak as part of this investigation. Health officials wanted to know when exactly the problems first cropped up, and whether they had missed many cases before those initial reports. That's why they turned to the surveillance data, collected from more than 3,200 emergency rooms from most states. They found a gradual increase in emergency-room visits among people who vaped or used e-cigarettes, starting in January of 2017. Narrowing their search to people under the age of 35, they detected a sharp spike in June of 2019 -- the same time that the doctors in Wisconsin reported their first cases. The number of cases climbed from June into September, when they peaked. They have since declined, but the CDC still reports about 100 cases a week, and the death toll continues to tick up.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from an Ars Technica article: In November, people started polishing a Nobel prize for a group of physicists who seemed to have found new boson. [...] This result has been cooking for quite some time. The first experimental results date back to 2015, with publication in 2016. Essentially, the scientists took some lithium and shot protons at it. By choosing the energy of the protons correctly, Beryllium in a particular excited state is produced, which quickly decays back to lithium by emitting an electron and a positron. Now, in these experiments, energy and momentum must be conserved. The lithium nucleus is quite a complicated beast and can rattle around in all sorts of ways, meaning that the electron and positron have a certain amount of freedom in the direction in which they are emitted. By contrast, the researchers observed that some electrons and positrons seem to be correlated in their emission direction. Computer modeling confirmed that this was not due to their equipment and could not be explained by the nuclear physics of beryllium, lithium, or any known background process. The correlation could, however, be explained by a new boson that decayed by emitting a positron and an electron. As long as the production was reasonably inefficient, and the mass was about 17MeV (million electron volts), then the data was beautifully explained.

It is always possible to extend our models of the Universe to include new particles, including new bosons and new forces. But, it isn't good enough to match a single experimental result. You have to match all of them. The end results are particles that look a bit like a backyard panel-beating job. Yeah, the paint matches, but you can still see the wavy patches where the filler hasn't been sanded flat. The problems arise from the mass -- 17MeV is at the low end of well-explored territory. So, why did this story flare back up again? A new paper, by the same scientists that published the beryllium results. This time, they measured electron-positron emissions from excited helium. Same experiment, different atom, but the same 17MeV boson was found. The new result is pretty strong evidence. "If the experiment has some kind of systematic error in it, then we would expect that the 'new' particle would change mass between helium and beryllium," adds Ars Technica. "It doesn't, though; the results are very consistent between experiments. That means that if it is an error, it is an unfortunately flukey one."

Companies are trying to capitalize on the threat of space junk with new technology to clean it up, but it's not clear who will pay for the service. From a report: Today, thousands of pieces of space junk -- ranging from tiny fragments of destroyed satellites to spent rocket bodies and defunct spacecraft -- orbit around Earth, threatening operational satellites and astronauts. As thousands of new satellites are slated for launch in the coming years, operators are desperate to find ways to track, remove and prevent the creation of more rogue debris in orbit. The market for in-orbit satellite services is projected to reach about $4.5 billion by 2028, according to Northern Sky Research. [...] Experts agree space junk is a major threat to keeping space usable and open for nations and companies around the world, but it's not clear who is or should be responsible for cleaning it up, complicating the business case for these companies.

pgmrdlm shares a report: Boeing's new Starliner capsule went off course after launch Friday and won't dock with the International Space Station during its first test flight. It was supposed to be a crucial dress rehearsal for next year's inaugural launch with astronauts. The blastoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida, went flawlessly as the Atlas V rocket lifted off with the Starliner capsule. But a half-hour into the flight, Boeing reported that the capsule didn't get into the right orbit to reach the space station. The capsule is still in space and will be brought back to Earth, landing in New Mexico as early as Sunday. Boeing is one of two companies hired by NASA to launch astronauts from the U.S. The space agency has been relying on Russian rockets to travel to the space station since the retirement of the space shuttle almost nine years ago. [...] This was Boeing's chance to catch up with SpaceX, NASA's other commercial crew provider that successfully completed a similar demonstration last March. SpaceX has one last hurdle -- a launch abort test -- before carrying two NASA astronauts in its Dragon capsule, possibly by spring.

dryriver writes: 27 years ago, the BBC's "Tomorrow's World" show broadcasted this little gem of a program [currently available on YouTube]. After showing old Red-Cyan Anaglyph movies, Victorian Stereoscopes, lenticular-printed holograms and a monochrome laser hologram projected into a sheet of glass, the presenter shows off a stereoscopic 3D CRT computer display with active shutter glasses. The program then takes us to a laboratory at Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, where a supercomputer is feeding 3D wireframe graphics into the world's first glasses-free holographic 3D display prototype using a Tellurium Dioxide crystal. One of the researchers at the lab predicts that "years from now, advances in LCD technology may make this kind of display cheap enough to use in the home."

A presenter then shows a bulky plastic VR headset larger than an Oculus Rift and explains how VR will let you experience completely computer-generated worlds as if you are there. The presenter notes that 1992 VR headsets may be "too bulky" for the average user, and shows a mockup of much smaller VR glasses about the size of Magic Leap's AR glasses, noting that "these are already in development." What is astonishing about watching this 27-year-old TV broadcast is a) the realization that much of today's stereo stereo 3D tech was already around in some form or another in the early 1990s; b) VR headsets took an incredibly long time to reach the consumer and are still too bulky; and that c) almost three decades later, MIT's prototype holographic glasses-free 3D display technology never made its way into consumer hands or households.

A new study has determined that a gas well blowout in Belmont County, Ohio last year was one of the most significant ever to occur in the country. Newsweek reports: In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists estimated that the gas well -- owned by ExxonMobil -- leaked around 120 metric tons of methane per hour over a period of 20 days before the company managed to fix the problem. This amounted to a total of more than 50,000 tons of methane. The authors -- led by Sudhanshu Pandey from SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research -- said that the hourly emission rate from the leak was about twice that of the widely reported event at an oil and gas storage facility in Alison Canyon, California, which took place in 2015 -- the largest known methane leak in the country.

While the emission rate of the Ohio event was higher, the California event lasted longer and produced more emissions overall, The New York Times reported. Nevertheless, the leak at the Belmont County well still released vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere, according to the researchers. In fact, it emitted more of the gas in 20 days than the oil and gas industries of some European nations do in a year. The scientists detected the leak using an instrument known as TROPOMI on the recently launched European Space Agency satellite Copernicus Sentinel-5P, which is designed to continuously monitor methane and other pollutants. [...] The Ohio incident did not garner much attention at the time, although 100 residents within a 100-mile radius had to be evacuated from their homes while workers attempted to fix the leak. Some of these residents had complained of health issues such as throat irritation, dizziness and breathing problems.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this year, researchers installed the world's highest weather station on the upper reaches of Mount Everest. The roughly 50-kilogram station, taller than a person, is one of five on and near the mountain that are collecting data about jet steam winds and warming conditions in High Mountain Asia, a region jam-packed with the most glaciers outside of Earth's poles. Tom Matthews, a climate scientist at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom, and Paul Mayewski, a glaciologist at the University of Maine in Orono, were part of the record-setting expedition. Matthews presented some of the group's results last week here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The two researchers chatted with Science about working at extreme altitudes, the power of body heat, and dealing with crowds on one of the world's most dangerous mountains.

There are real concerns about the way 5G is being deployed in the US, including security issues, the potential to interfere with weather forecasting systems, and the FCC steamrolling local regulators in the name of accelerating the 5G rollout. But concerns over the potential health impacts of 5G are overblown. From a report: If you weren't worried about prior generations of cellular service causing cancer, 5G doesn't produce much new to worry about. And you probably didn't need to be worried before. Few 5G services will use higher frequencies in the near term, and there's little reason to think these frequencies are any more harmful than other types of electromagnetic radiation such as visible light. Most concerns about health impacts from 5G stem from millimeter-wave technology, high-frequency radio waves that are supposed to deliver much faster speeds. The catch is that millimeter-wave transmissions are far less reliable at long distances than transmissions using the lower frequencies that mobile carriers have traditionally used. To provide reliable, ubiquitous 5G service over millimeter-wave frequencies, carriers will need a larger number of smaller access points.

That's led to two fears: That the effects of millimeter-wave signals might be more dangerous than traditional frequencies; and that the larger number of access points, some potentially much closer to people's homes, might expose people to more radiation than 4G services. But millimeter waves aren't the only, or even the main, way that carriers will deliver 5G service. T-Mobile offers the most widespread 5G service available today. But it uses a band of low frequencies originally used for broadcast television. Sprint, meanwhile, repurposed some of the "mid-band" spectrum it uses for 4G to provide 5G. Verizon and AT&T both offer millimeter-wave-based services, but they're only available in a handful of locations. The wireless industry is focused more on using mid- and low-band frequencies for 5G, because deploying a massive number of millimeter-wave access points will be time-consuming and expensive. In other words, 5G will continue using the same radio frequencies that have been used for decades for broadcast radio and television, satellite communications, mobile services, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People living with air pollution have higher rates of depression and suicide, a systematic review of global data has found. Cutting air pollution around the world to the EU's legal limit could prevent millions of people becoming depressed, the research suggests. This assumes that exposure to toxic air is causing these cases of depression. Scientists believe this is likely but is difficult to prove beyond doubt. The particle pollution analyzed in the study is produced by burning fossil fuels in vehicles, homes and industry. The researchers said the new evidence further strengthened calls to tackle what the World Health Organization calls the "silent public health emergency" of dirty air.

The research, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, used strict quality criteria to select and pool research data from 16 countries published up to 2017. This revealed a strong statistical link between toxic air and depression and suicide. [...] The data analyzed in the new research linked depression with air pollution particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers (equivalent to 0.0025 millimeters and known as PM2.5). People exposed to an increase of 10 micrograms per cubic meter (ug/m^3) in the level of PM2.5 for a year or more had a 10% higher risk of getting depression. Levels of PM2.5 in cities range from as high as 114ug/m^3 in Delhi, India, to just 6ug/m^3 in Ottawa, Canada. In UK cities in 2017, the average PM2.5 level was 13ug/m^3. The researchers estimated that lowering this to the WHO recommended limit of 10ug/m^3 could reduce depression in city dwellers by about 2.5%. The available data on suicide risk was for particles ranging up to 10 micrometers (PM10). The researchers found a short-term effect, with a 10ug/m^3 increase over three days raising the risk of suicide by 2%. "The results show strong correlations, but research that would prove a causal link is difficult because ethical experiments cannot deliberately expose people to harm," the report notes.

"The studies analyzed took account of many factors that might affect mental health, including home location, income, education, smoking, employment and obesity. But they were not able to separate the potential impact of noise, which often occurs alongside air pollution and is known to have psychological effects."

Astronomers compared old views of the sky with what we see today and found that at least 100 stars appear to have vanished, or were perhaps covered up. While they've seen no signs of aliens just yet, they say parts of space where multiple stars seem to disappear could be the best places to look for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). CNET reports: On March 16, 1950, astronomers at the U.S. Naval Observatory pointed a telescope roughly in the direction of the constellation Lupus the wolf and took a picture. When scientists look at that same patch of sky today, something is missing, and it could be evidence of something else lurking out there. Back in 2016, researchers in Sweden reported that a star had been lost. One of the roiling distant suns visible in that USNO image from the previous century could no longer be seen, even with the more advanced and sensitive digital sky surveys in use today.

The team published a paper on the discovery, but called it "very uncertain" at the time, resolving to do more follow-up work and to continue scouring old USNO observations for other celestial objects that seem to have gone missing. Three years later, it's still unclear what happened to that star spotted in 1950, but the team behind the "Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations" (Vasco) project now says they've found a hundred more missing stars like it by comparing old and new observations. "Unless a star directly collapses into a black hole, there is no known physical process by which it could physically vanish," explains a new study published in the Astronomical Journal and led by Beatriz Villarroel of Stockholm University and Spain's Instituto de AstrofÃsica de Canarias. "The implications of finding such objects extend from traditional astrophysics fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Prehistoric children may have been cherished by their parents -- but until recently, they've been neglected by many archaeologists, who assumed that childhood is simply about toys and games. Now, a new study adds to the growing literature that prehistoric children were hard workers, who learned from an early age to use the weapons and tools that would help them with the rigors of adulthood. The tools and weapons the team found "were just not made for adult-sized hands." Instead, they appeared to be scaled-down versions for children. Perhaps, the researchers speculate, adults fashioned the tiny tools so that youngsters could begin to hone the hunting skills they would later need.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober is at it again with the Glitter Bomb 2.0 designed to give porch pirates some stinky karmic justice. After experiencing a package theft last year, Rober decided to exact revenge by creating the original glitter bomb. It looked like a real delivery and was designed to go off when opened by thieves, covering them with glitter and emitting a fart smell, while recording the whole thing. He made another one this year with an even nastier stench, and got an assist from the man who inspired the idea: Home Alone's Macaulay Culkin.

Rober said he spent six months retooling the bomb, which combines GPS trackers, smartphones with wide-angle cameras, fart spray and glitter. This time, the design was more streamlined, had much more powerful fart spray ("that's like proper poo," said one test subject), and featured sound effects like a countdown and police radio chatter. The whole thing was sponsored by Bose and the product box featured fake Bose "Buzz" headphones named after a Home Alone character. Rober distributed the packages to 10 volunteers around the U.S., who placed them on their porches as bait. One would-be theft kenned to the scheme after glitter spilled out, as he was apparently aware of the original video (which currently has 77 million views). Another volunteer just took the package himself, so Rober sent him a Scientology subscription and cringey postcards to his neighbors. After the first Glitter Bomb video was posted last year, Rober had to re-post it after discovering that several of the "victims" were actually friends of a volunteer who agreed to place the packages on his porch.

New submitter RG-man writes: DNA obtained from birch pitch used as a type of ancient chewing gum has revealed significant insights into the life of a young girl who lived 5,700 years ago. CNN reports: "...[Lola] chewed on birch pitch, a material that functioned a bit like an ancient chewing gum. A study of that birch pitch has uncovered the girl's entire genome and oral microbiome, marking the first time human genetic material has successfully been extracted from something besides human bones. The study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

By extracting DNA from the birch pitch, the researchers learned that it had been chewed by a female genetically closely related to hunter-gatherers from the European mainland, rather than those in central Scandinavia. Specific genes told them about her hair, skin and eye color, similar to that of other European hunter-gatherers. 'What is more, we also retrieved DNA from oral microbes and several important human pathogens, which makes this a very valuable source of ancient DNA, especially for time periods where we have no human remains,' said Hannes Schroeder, study author and associate professor from the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Plant and animal DNA trapped in the pitch also revealed that she had eaten hazelnuts and duck, likely staples of her diet."

Guillaume Lample and Francois Charton, at Facebook AI Research in Paris, say they have developed an algorithm that can calculate integrals and solve differential equations. MIT Technology Review reports: Neural networks have become hugely accomplished at pattern-recognition tasks such as face and object recognition, certain kinds of natural language processing, and even playing games like chess, Go, and Space Invaders. But despite much effort, nobody has been able to train them to do symbolic reasoning tasks such as those involved in mathematics. The best that neural networks have achieved is the addition and multiplication of whole numbers. For neural networks and humans alike, one of the difficulties with advanced mathematical expressions is the shorthand they rely on. For example, the expression x^3 is a shorthand way of writing x multiplied by x multiplied by x. In this example, "multiplication" is shorthand for repeated addition, which is itself shorthand for the total value of two quantities combined.

Enter Lample and Charton, who have come up with an elegant way to unpack mathematical shorthand into its fundamental units. They then teach a neural network to recognize the patterns of mathematical manipulation that are equivalent to integration and differentiation. Finally, they let the neural network loose on expressions it has never seen and compare the results with the answers derived by conventional solvers like Mathematica and Matlab. The first part of this process is to break down mathematical expressions into their component parts. Lample and Charton do this by representing expressions as tree-like structures. The leaves on these trees are numbers, constants, and variables like x; the internal nodes are operators like addition, multiplication, differentiate-with-respect-to, and so on. [...] Trees are equal when they are mathematically equivalent. For example, 2 + 3 = 5 = 12 - 7 = 1 x 5 are all equivalent; therefore their trees are equivalent too. These trees can also be written as sequences, taking each node consecutively. In this form, they are ripe for processing by a neural network approach called seq2seq.

The next stage is the training process, and this requires a huge database of examples to learn from. Lample and Charton create this database by randomly assembling mathematical expressions from a library of binary operators such as addition, multiplication, and so on; unary operators such as cos, sin, and exp; and a set of variables, integers, and constants, such as [pi] and e. They also limit the number of internal nodes to keep the equations from becoming too big. [...] Finally, Lample and Charton put their neural network through its paces by feeding it 5,000 expressions it has never seen before and comparing the results it produces in 500 cases with those from commercially available solvers, such as Maple, Matlab, and Mathematica. The comparisons between these and the neural-network approach are revealing. "On all tasks, we observe that our model significantly outperforms Mathematica," say the researchers. "On function integration, our model obtains close to 100% accuracy, while Mathematica barely reaches 85%." And the Maple and Matlab packages perform less well than Mathematica on average. The paper, called "Deep Learning For Symbolic Mathematics," can be found on arXiv.

Europe is launching a space telescope on Tuesday to further study distant planets that have already been discovered. The BBC reports: The telescope will ride to orbit on a Russian Soyuz rocket from French Guiana. Lift-off is scheduled for 05:54 local time (08:54 GMT). Cheops (short for Characterizing ExOPlanet Satellite) is a joint endeavor of 11 member states of the European Space Agency (ESA), with Switzerland in the lead.

The University of Bern, together with the University of Geneva, has provided a powerful photometer for the telescope. The instrument will measure the tiny changes in light when a world passes in front of its host star. This event, referred to as a transit, will betray a precise diameter for the planet because the changes in light are proportional to the surface of the world. When that information is combined with data about the mass of the object - obtained through other means - it will be possible for scientists to deduce a density. [...] The mission has been given a list of 400-500 targets to look at over the next 3.5 years. Most of these worlds will be in the size range between Earth and Neptune, sometimes called "super Earths." From all the exoplanet surveys conducted to date, this grouping would seem to dominate the statistics.

The debate over what to call cell-cultured meat remains unresolved -- and it could soon develop into a headache for the global lab-grown meat technology startups working to bring clean meat to consumers. Quartz reports: The window of opportunity to unify around a term for motherless meat is closing. If cultivated meat companies such as JUST, Memphis Meats, Aleph Farms, and Finless Foods want to present a consistent face before the first cell-based meat is unveiled to consumers, they'll likely have to act in 2020. That's when industry insiders speculate Singaporean food regulators will be the first in the world to approve serving in vitro meat. Back in 2013, when the possibility of growing meat in a laboratory setting was first introduced in London (paywall), the term "lab-grown meat" dominated international headlines. The unveiling of a real product on the market will likely draw the same kind of attention -- offering a rare second chance to make a first impression on consumers. Unlike plant-based meat imitators, these alternatives are grown from actual animal cells into fat and muscle tissue, producing a real meat product without killing an animal. The process is said to leave a much smaller environmental footprint than conventional animal agriculture.

But what are people supposed to call this new meat when they talk about it with their friends and family? Producers say it won't be grown in labs in the future. Instead, it will be in standard food processing facilities. So what wording will distinguish it from conventional meat? Is it in vitro meat? Too weird, some say. Lab-grown meat? Not accurate. Animal-free meat? Nope. Motherless meat? Immaculate meat? Those are long shots, too. Ask people working in the industry about their collective indecision and many respond with groans. Some even say they don't rank the naming issue as a high priority. "Clean meat was the original label, and of course that's changed over time to cultured," says Brian Spears, the founder and CEO of New Age Meats. "Then there was cell-based. And now we are a cultivated company."

"The basic term for it should be something that is accurate and comforting," says Josh Balk, who co-founded JUST.

Bruce Friedrich, executive director of the Good Food Institute, started referring to the meat as "cultivated meat," arguing that use of the term was backed with real data (PDF).

New Jersey's largest hospital system said that it has paid hackers a ransom after a ransomware attack disrupted its services earlier this month. Threatpost reports: Hackensack Meridian Health, a $6 billion non-profit health provider system based in Edison, N.J., operates 17 hospitals, nursing homes and outpatient centers, as well as psychiatric facility Carrier Clinic. The hospital system told media outlets on Friday that it was targeted by a cyberattack on Dec. 2, crippling its computer software systems for nearly five days. "Our network's primary clinical systems are operational, and our IT teams continue working diligently to bring all applications back online safely," according to a statement issued to media, Friday. "Based on our investigation to date, we have no indication that any patient or team-member information has been subject to unauthorized access or disclosure."

The attack affected the hospital's computer software systems, from scheduling and billing systems to labs and radiology, according to reports. Consequently, the ransomware attack forced the hospitals that were part of Hackensack Meridian Health system to reschedule around 100 non-emergency appointments and surgeries earlier in December. The hospital system did not clarify how much ransom it paid, or whether its data has since been recovered. It also did not give further indication about how systems were first infected and what data was affected.