Short Takes – 10-27-26 - Medical Edition

CDC Issues Emergency Response for Florida Dengue Outbreak. MedPageToday.com article. Pull quote: “Florida is in the midst of its largest dengue outbreak in decades, with 745 cases this year; 425 of those have been locally acquired, and most are concentrated in the Tampa area. That figure marks the largest dengue outbreak in the continental U.S. since 1935.” 

Africa at risk of continent-wide Ebola crisis, health chief warns. Semafor.com article. Pull quote: “More than 4,600 people have died in the outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain which was first detected in DR Congo in May, though health experts believe it had been circulating undetected for weeks. It has now spread further across Africa than any previous Ebola outbreak, with cases in the continent’s central, eastern and western regions. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, confirmed its first case of the Bundibugyo strain, for which there is no proven vaccine, despite being absent from the agency’s initial list of 15 countries at risk, he said. Kenya has reported nine cases while Uganda, which recorded 20 cases, was declared free of Ebola in August.” 

GLP-1s May Interact With Psychiatry Medication, Case Report Suggests. MedPageToday.com article.  Pull quote: “While this interaction has been reported before -- it's the fourth reported case of tirzepatide-associated lithium toxicity, they said -- it's still not well understood, Davis said.” 

A fighter pilot had unexplained headaches for over a year, and the cause was hiding in plain sight. LiveScience.com article. Pull quote: "At that point the officer did not connect the cessation of headaches with the use of the new helmet," the doctors reported. "Reviewing the case in its entirety, the diagnosis of migraine or vascular headache was found to be incorrect; instead the individual was suffering from external compression headache due to an ill fitting helmet." 

A woman’s uterus has been kept alive outside the body for the first time. TechnologyReview.com article. Pull quote: “It won’t be easy to maintain a uterus for that long, cautions Brandacher. As far as he knows, no one has been able to maintain a liver for more than seven days. “No studies out there … have shown 30-day survival in a machine perfusion circuit,” he says.” 

Congo’s Ebola outbreak tops 10,000 cases as authorities race to slow the spread in African countries. TheHill.com article. Pull quote: “About 80% of recorded cases are still coming from outside of monitored contacts, showing there are ongoing chains of transmission that health authorities are not aware of. At least 95% of recorded cases are supposed to be coming from known contacts for officials to say the outbreak has largely been brought under control, the Africa CDC has said.” 

Review – Bills Introduced – 10-26-26

Yesterday, with the House meeting in pro forma session, there were 13 bills introduced. One of those bills may receive additional coverage in this blog: 

HR 10915 To require the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop new standards, methodologies, and recommendations with respect to the cybersecurity of cloud-based infrastructure, and for other purposes. McCormick, Richard [Rep.-R-GA-7] 

For more information on these bills, including legislative history for similar bills in the 118th Congress, as well as a mention in-passing of a post-fire landscape restoration bill, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/bills-introduced-10-26-26 - subscription required. 

Short Takes – 10-26-26 - Space Geek Edition

Russian Military Satellite Shadows Finnish ICEYE Radar Craft Amid Heightened Orbital Defense Concerns. SatNews.com article. Pull quote: “The Finnish-built platform is part of ICEYE’s radar-imaging constellation, which provides all-weather radar reconnaissance and expanded operational access under an intelligence cooperation agreement with Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence. While neither platform sustained physical damage or orbital disruption, defense analysts warn that co-orbital shadowing enables adversarial platforms to conduct close-range electronic inspection, signal interception, or non-kinetic jamming against allied remote sensing networks.” 

SpaceX plans Starship upper stage catch on next launch. SpaceNews.com article. Pull quote: “SpaceX has recovered and reflown the Super Heavy booster but has not attempted to catch the ship back at the launch site. Recovery and rapid reuse of both Starship stages are essential to SpaceX’s plans for high flight rates and low per-flight costs for the vehicle.” 

Space Force scrambles as Musk’s SpaceX retires its major rocket. Politico.com article. Pull quote: “The Space Force recently tried to book rides for three future satellite missions, but SpaceX declined to offer its services, according to two people familiar with the missions. No other rocket companies offered to take them either, the people said.” 

A Chinese rocket deorbited over Minnesota and left this in a farmer’s cornfield. ArsTechnica.com article. Pull quote: “LandSpace, the company that owns the Zhuque rocket family, has not publicly acknowledged the debris fall over Minnesota. The usual practice for rocket disposals is to steer them toward reentry over the ocean, suggesting the incident on September 15 was perhaps the result of a botched deorbit burn.” 

Rubin telescope should find more of Earth's mysterious 'mini-moons' — including some we can study up close. Space.com article. Pull quote: “The short warning times and instability of the orbits of mini-moons dictates potential mission profiles. A spacecraft could wait in Earth-moon space, ready to head for a newly found mini-moon, similar to how ESA's Comet Interceptor will launch and then wait for a suitable comet to study. Asteroids could also be nudged into more stable orbits, allowing more extensive future missions.” 

I Voted Today – Georgia Early Voting

I voted today. Not unusual, I have voted every two years since I reached 18 years old a couple of decades back. When I first started voting it was easy; I had been working in Republican politics since 1964, so I voted nearly straight party line. The older I have gotten, the more difficult that has been; I have grown more interested in the details of politics and less in the labels. 

I was not sure who I was going to vote for the top office on the ballot today, when I first stood in front of the voting machine. Neither will likely make a good governor, and there was no third-party candidate to vote for. In the end, it came down to voting against someone who was not on the ballot today, and I am not really happy about that. 

I would have preferred to vote for ‘None of the above’. I think that with that option and a majority vote requirement (50% +1 vote to win), we might actually end up with better campaigns. Continuing the negative campaigns would just push more people to vote ‘NOTA’. Campaigns might actually have to focus more on why we should vote for someone, rather than against. 

Looking Back – 8-3-25 – Public ICS Disclosures

Nearly every morning I start my computer time by looking at information from Google about what happened in my blog in the previous 24 hours. Google, and blogspot.com is a Google service, provides interesting pieces of analytical data about my blog readership. One item of particular interest is the top ten blog posts each day. As you would expect, most of those posts were from the last couple of days, but with 16 years of publishing this blog, every once-in-a-while, a blog post from ancient history rises into that list. 

Today a blog post from August 2025 made the list; not as long ago as normal, but interesting nonetheless. There used to be a series of posts I did every weekend where I would post about new advisories from control system related vendors that had not been covered by CISA that week. They started as short posts, frequently only two or three advisories each week. But as my list of vendors and then researchers (as I added researcher reports on ICS vulnerabilities) continued to grow, so did the number of weekly advisories included in the post. That growth frequently required two or three posts per week.  

I stopped making these posts due to the amount of time it consumed every weekend. It was a lot of work, and too much time away from the family. With no reader feedback, either on the posts or their stoppage, I think that this was probably a good decision. 

But this last weekend, I used my list of vendor websites to compile the list of PHP2Shell advisories published, and I realized how many advisories I had missed since I stopped making these posts. So, I am reconsidering that decision. I do not think that I would be covering as many vendors and researchers, over 200 vendor websites on my current list. Still thinking about how I would select the vendors and researchers that would be covered by the weekly post.