SoBig virus continues to clog e-mails
WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 (UPI) -- The outlaw SoBig.F virus continued to invade e-mail systems worldwide Thursday as authorities sought to put the guilty spammer in the slammer.
Computer security companies are investigating the possibility the virus was created to open holes in e-mail systems so unwanted e-mail could be sent anonymously, the Washington Times said. Several said they believed it was built by one person for profit, though several others may have had a hand in it.
The virus, considered the most widespread of its kind, accounted for about 70 percent of all e-mail sent Wednesday. It caused some organizations to shut down their e-mail systems and others to report millions of dollars in lost productivity. AOL told the BBC it had stopped more than 11.5 million copies of the virus since it first appeared on Aug. 18.
The virus, in addition to mass-mailing itself to people listed in e-mail address books, creates system vulnerabilities that allow sending e-mail that can't be traced.
Fight over bill said inflates care costs
NEW YORK, Aug. 21 (UPI) -- The cost of processing U.S. heath care paperwork, on a per-patient basis, is more than three times the cost in Canada, a Harvard study shows.
Part of the reason is the wrangling over who is going to pay the bill, the Wall Street Journal said Thursday.
The study was conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School and published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. It said savings gleaned from a national health insurance system like Canada's would be enough to provide medical insurance for the 41 million Americans who lack coverage.
"What we've got now under the current health-care system in the U.S. is a giant food fight between doctors, hospitals, patients and insurance companies as to who gets stuck with the bill," said Steffie Woolhandler, associate medical professor at Harvard Medical School and the study's lead author.
But, in an editorial, Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution in Washington questioned the motivation of the study's researchers.
Worm is one of man's closest relatives
LONDON, Aug. 21 (UPI) -- British scientists have decided an enigmatic worm that resides at the bottom of a Swedish fjord is a relative to man.
Long written off as an obscure mollusk, a rare 1.5 inch worm called Xenoturbella that lives in the mud is now considered a relative to humans, a report in the journal Nature said Thursday.
The research offers proof humans and Xenoturbella, whose Latin name means strange flatworm, derive from a common ancestor that lived a half-billion years ago, thereby placing Xenoturbella in the same division of the animal kingdom as man and offering new insights into how we evolved.
A team led by Dr. Max Telford of Cambridge University made the discovery by investigating the genetic make-up of Xenoturbella.
"It is fascinating to think that whatever long-dead animal this simple worm evolved from, so did we," he said.
