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Last Updated: 2022-07-16 9:30:01 AM
Publish Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2022 11:30:19 +0000
Enlarge / This is the last time that the Manhattan skyline will play backdrop to Formula E's Gen2 car, shown here. Next year the sport gets an all-new machine with a lot more power and a lot less mass.
Formula E makes its annual return to Red Hook this weekend for the New York City ePrix. Ars sadly won't be on hand for the races, which is a shame as it will be my last chance to see the Gen2 electric race car in action. I will have to make every effort to be there in 2023, however.
Next year will see significant changes for the all-electric racing series, including a much more powerful, much faster racing car and changes to some rules to make the races interesting. I can't guarantee it, but I think there's a good chance we won't see the return of Fan Boost, which will make some corners of the internet happy.
What's clear is that the series remains unafraid of thinking differently, and it's helpful to remember that we're talking about a sport that's still only in its eighth season. Jamie Reigle took over as Formula E's CEO in 2019, and last week I spoke to him about how the series has progressed and what we should look forward to in the next few years.
Publish Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2022 11:00:46 +0000
Enlarge (credit: Maskot/Getty)
To graduate with a science major, college students must complete between 40 and 60 credit hours of science coursework. That means spending around 2,500 hours in the classroom throughout their undergraduate career.
However, research has shown that despite all that effort, most college science courses give students only a fragmented understanding of fundamental scientific concepts. The teaching method reinforces memorization of isolated facts, proceeding from one textbook chapter to the next without necessarily making connections between them, instead of learning how to use the information and connect those facts meaningfully.
The ability to make these connections is important beyond the classroom as well, because it’s the basis of science literacy: the ability to use scientific knowledge to accurately evaluate information and make decisions based on evidence.
Publish Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2022 00:00:26 +0000
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
From the what-could-possibly-go-wrong files comes this: An industrial control engineer recently made a workstation part of a botnet after inadvertently installing malware advertising itself as a means for recovering lost passwords.
Lost passwords happen in many organizations. A programmable logic controller—used to automate processes inside factories, electric plants, and other industrial settings—may be set up and largely forgotten over the following years. When a replacement engineer later identifies a problem affecting the PLC, they can discover the now long-gone original engineer never left the passcode behind before departing the company.
According to a blog post from security firm Dragos, an entire ecosystem of malware attempts to capitalize on scenarios like this one inside industrial facilities. Online advertisements like those below promote password crackers for PLCs and human-machine interfaces, which are the workhorses inside these environments.
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 22:21:51 +0000
Enlarge / A vial of the Monkeypox vaccine is displayed by a medical professional at a vaccination site at the Northwell Health offices at Cherry Grove on Fire Island, New York, on July 13, 2022. (credit: Getty | James Carbone)
US monkeypox cases hit 1,470 this week, and federal officials reported Friday that they expect the tally to continue rising amid expanded testing, continued community transmission, and a current shortage of vaccines. The federal update comes as officials face growing criticism over their handling of the outbreak, and experts fear it may already be too late to contain the virus.
Overall, the multinational monkeypox outbreak has tallied nearly 13,000 cases, with the largest counts in Spain (2,835), Germany (1,859), and the UK (1,856). The US now ranks fourth worldwide. But, it could potentially move up in the ranks quickly.
"We anticipate an increase in cases in the coming weeks," Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a press briefing Friday. Walensky laid out three reasons why they are expecting an upcoming rise.
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 20:29:22 +0000
Enlarge / Apple's App Store. (credit: Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Throughout the short history of smartphone apps, games have consistently driven more revenue than non-gaming app categories. But that has finally changed in the United States, according to new data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
The shift began in May 2022. By June, 50.3 percent of US consumer spending on apps was on non-game apps like TikTok, Netflix, and Tinder. Spending on non-game apps has recently grown at twice the rate as spending on games. Game spending was exploding at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019 and early 2020, but by late 2020, non-gaming apps caught up, and they surpassed games in 2021.
This has been driven in part by the shift so many apps have made to a subscription-based model of late. For years, games generated more revenue not necessarily because they got more downloads (though they often did) but because their long-term monetization was clearer, more consistent, and more robust thanks to in-app transactions. Other types of apps didn't have that going for them, and many were sold for one-time purchase prices or offered a limited number of premium upgrades.
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 18:50:40 +0000
Enlarge (credit: MONEY SHARMA / Contributor | AFP)
Throughout the pandemic, the world’s richest men added about a trillion dollars to their net worth. The Washington Post reported that SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos pocketed a fifth of that. But while some billionaires spent the pandemic getting richer, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates looked at the world crumbling around him and decided to make a different business plan.
“I will move down and eventually off of the list of the world’s richest people,” Gates declared in a blog, announcing his plan to personally donate funds that will dramatically increase the annual amount that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pays out to support global initiatives in the name of progress.
To address global crises that Gates says have been profoundly exacerbated by the pandemic, “the Gates Foundation intends to increase spending from nearly $6 billion per year before COVID to $9 billion per year by 2026.” The proposed 50 percent annual budget increase has already been unanimously agreed upon “in principle” by the foundation's formal board members.
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 17:34:46 +0000
Enlarge / Intel's 12th-generation Core CPUs use different types of CPU cores for different tasks. That hybrid architecture continues to cause problems for some software. (credit: Intel)
Earlier this week, some people waiting to take the bar exam received a message from ExamSoft, the company that makes the Examplify software that many states use to administer the exam: PCs with Intel's latest 12th-generation Core processors are "not currently supported" because they were "triggering Examplify's automatic virtual machine check." The company's suggested solution was that people find another device to take the test with, a frustrating and unhelpful "workaround" for anyone with a new computer.
As pointed out by The Verge, Examsoft's system requirements page for its software provides no additional detail, simply reiterating that 12th-gen CPUs aren't currently supported and that you aren't allowed to run the Examplify software within a virtual machine. But it's not the first time a problem like this has surfaced, and the culprit is almost certainly the hybrid CPU architecture that Intel is using in most 12th-gen chips.
In previous generations, all of the cores in a given Intel CPU have been identical to one another: same design, same performance, same features. Clock speed and power usage would ramp up and down based on what the computer was doing at any given time, but the cores themselves were all the same and could be treated that way by the operating system. In 12th-gen chips, CPUs come with a mix of completely different processor cores: large, fast performance cores (or P-cores) handle the heavy lifting, while smaller, low-power efficiency cores (or E-cores) handle lighter tasks. But because operating systems and most apps are used to assuming that all CPU cores in a given system are the same, software has needed to be modified to tell the difference between the two.
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 17:25:22 +0000
How do I do this without a touchscreen? [credit:
NYT / Hasbro ]
On Thursday, The New York Times and Hasbro announced Wordle: The Party Game, a $20 physical version of the viral web game hit that will be available starting in October. But this new game is far from the first to allow players to essentially "play Wordle in real life," as the marketing copy promises.
Aside from the obvious change in medium, Wordle: The Party Game differentiates itself from its digital inspiration mainly through multiplayer gameplay designed for two to four players (recommended for ages 14 and up, according to the manufacturer). The most basic play mode has players alternating as the "host" who gets to choose a secret five-letter word—don't worry, CNN reports the game will come packaged with "an official word list to use, compiled by the Times" if you can't think of your own.
The non-host player then uses an included dry-erase game board to guess at the host's secret word. After that, the host marks letters using translucent green and yellow tiles—patterned after the digital game—to indicate letters that are in the correct spot and letters that are present somewhere else in the secret word, respectively. Players receive points based on how many guesses it takes to home in on the secret word.
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 16:59:04 +0000
Enlarge / Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel during a House Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee hearing on March 31, 2022, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Kevin Dietsch )
Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel is aiming to increase the agency's broadband speed standard from 25Mbps to 100Mbps on the download side and from 3Mbps to 20Mbps for uploads.
Rosenworcel's "Notice of Inquiry proposes to increase the national broadband standard to 100 megabits per second for download and 20 megabits per second for upload and discusses a range of evidence supporting this standard, including the requirements for new networks funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act," the FCC said in an announcement today. Rosenworcel is also proposing "a separate national goal of 1Gbps/500Mbps for the future."
The 25/3Mbps metric was adopted in January 2015 under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler and was never updated by former Chairman Ajit Pai during his four-year term leading the commission. Pai decided in January 2021 that 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds were still fast enough for home Internet users.
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 16:52:58 +0000
Scroll down on a Google Play app listing and you'll soon see this new privacy section. [credit:
Google ]
Google's developer deadline for the Play Store's new "Data Safety" section is next week (July 20), and we're starting to see what the future of Google Play privacy will look like. The actual Data Safety section started rolling out in April, but now that the developer deadline is approaching... Google is turning off the separate "app permissions" section? That doesn't sound like a great move for privacy at all.
The Play Store's new Data Safety section is Google's answer to a similar feature in iOS 14, which displays a list of developer-provided privacy considerations, like what data an app collects, how that data is stored, and who the data is shared with. At first blush, the Data Safety entries might seem pretty similar to the old list of app permissions. You get items like "location," and in some ways, it's better than a plain list of permissions since developers can explain how and why each bit of data is collected.
The difference is in how that data ends up in Google's system. The old list of app permissions was guaranteed to be factual because it was built by Google, automatically, by scanning the app. The Data Safety system, meanwhile, runs on the honor system. Here's Google's explanation to developers of how the new section works:
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 16:19:46 +0000
Enlarge / If you live in the West, it's difficult to maintain denial about fires and drought. (credit: Josh Edelson | AFP | Getty Images)
There are many dramatic contrasts between the Biden administration and its immediate predecessor, and climate policy is high on the list. After four years of promises to restore coal use and claims that windmills caused cancer, we have an administration that promises to cut emissions in half by the end of the decade.
What does the US public think of this change? The Pew Research Center has been tracking attitudes on climate issues for the past several years, and it has new polling data from early May. The polling shows a general weakening of support for climate policies, with most of the change coming from Republicans. But it also shows that the two parties may not even inhabit the same reality, as they largely disagree about whether the weather has changed.
Mind the gap
Pew's data is based on a survey of over 10,000 US residents, and it was performed in early May (that's before the most recent surge in gasoline prices, which may be relevant for some questions). In a number of cases, the same questions have been asked for several years running, so we have some data on how attitudes have changed over the transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration.
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 15:58:01 +0000
Enlarge / Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery, seated in the middle and surrounded by the court's vice chancellors and masters in chancery. (credit: Delaware Court of Chancery )
Elon Musk has reason to worry about the Delaware Court of Chancery judge handling Twitter's lawsuit against him. Kathaleen McCormick, the court's chancellor, or chief judge, "has a no-nonsense reputation as well as the distinction of being one of the few jurists who has ever ordered a reluctant buyer to close a US corporate merger," Reuters wrote today.
Specifically, McCormick last year "order[ed] an affiliate of private equity firm Kohlberg & Co LLC to close its $550 million purchase of DecoPac Holding Inc, which makes cake decorating products," Reuters wrote.
McCormick's April 2021 ruling in that case, available on the court's website, centered on a specific performance clause in the purchase contract—similar to the clause that Twitter is citing in its attempt to force Musk to complete his $44 billion purchase. "Chalking up a victory for deal certainty, this post-trial decision resolves all issues in favor of the seller and orders the buyers to close on the purchase agreement," McCormick wrote in the ruling.
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 15:49:18 +0000
Slow-motion video of pecking by the pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus). The original video was recorded at 1600 frames per second. Credit: Robert Shadwick & Erica Ortlieb/University of British Columbia
Slow-motion video of pecking by the pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus). The original video was recorded at 1600 frames per second. Credit: Robert Shadwick & Erica Ortlieb/University of British Columbia
Check out almost any popular science article about woodpeckers and you'll likely find some mention of why the birds don't seem to suffer concussions, despite energetically drumming away at tree trunks all day with their beaks. Conventional wisdom holds that the structure of the woodpecker's skull and beak acts as a kind of built-in shock absorber, protecting the bird from injury. But a new paper published in the journal Current Biology argues that this is incorrect and that woodpecker heads behave more like stiff hammers than shock absorbers.
“While filming the woodpeckers in zoos, I have witnessed parents explaining to their kids that woodpeckers don’t get headaches because they have shock absorbers built into their head,” said co-author Sam Van Wassenbergh of Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium. “This myth of shock absorption in woodpeckers is now busted by our findings.”
As for why this particular myth has endured for so long, Van Wassenbergh told Ars, "To us humans, the first thing that comes to our mind when watching an animal violently smashing their head against trees is to wish the animal had some kind of a built-in cushioning to prevent it from getting headaches or concussions. It is logical for us to think of such action in terms of protection and safety, as if it is an accident."
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 14:45:03 +0000
Enlarge / Ukraine's Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova (C-L) and Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Britain's Karim Khan (C-R), visit a mass grave on the grounds of the Church of Saint Andrew in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, on April 13, 2022. (credit: Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images)
TikTok is resisting calls to preserve and hand over access to its content for war crime investigations, as lawyers and activists warn that the Chinese-owned app is a major data challenge in prosecuting atrocities in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The video app’s popularity with young Ukrainians and Russians posting footage of the war has made it a trove of digital intelligence that investigators are attempting to mine and archive as evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and illegal acts of violence in Ukraine.
TikTok, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, has been criticized for being slow to respond to requests for product changes that allow the video app’s content to be archived and verified more easily, as well as better access to TikTok’s platform for members of civil society.
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 14:21:12 +0000
Enlarge / A PC running Windows 11. (credit: Microsoft)
Microsoft is planning yet another big change to the way it updates Windows, according to a report from Windows Central. Rather than updating a single version of Windows for many years as it did with Windows 10, Microsoft plans to return to a schedule where it releases a new major version of Windows roughly once every three years, putting a hypothetical "Windows 12" on track for release at some point in the fall of 2024.
On the surface, this looks a lot like a return to the pre-Windows 10 status quo. 2006's Windows Vista was succeeded by 2009's Windows 7, 2012's Windows 8, and 2015's Windows 10. But the report says that Microsoft will continue to refine the current Windows release at a steady clip, with new feature drops (internally called "Moments") planned roughly once per quarter. We've already gotten a taste of that with Windows 11, which has evolved steadily throughout the year instead of saving all its big changes for the pending Windows 11 22H2 update.
When Windows 11 was released in October of 2021, Microsoft said that both Windows 11 and Windows 10 would receive major "feature update releases" once per year in the second half of the year. This was already a change from Windows 10, which received two of these updates per year. But Windows Central reports that Windows 11's 2023 feature update has already been "scrapped," suggesting that the big yearly update model could be going away for good.
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 14:00:56 +0000
Enlarge / Anna Kikina will be the fifth Russian woman to go to space. (credit: Roscosmos)
NASA and its Russian counterpart, Roscosmos, have officially agreed to exchange seats on four upcoming missions to the International Space Station. The first missions—with a Russian on SpaceX's Crew Dragon and an American on Soyuz vehicles—will fly in September.
"Flying integrated crews ensures there are appropriately trained crew members on board the station for essential maintenance and spacewalks," said NASA spokesman Josh Finch in a statement. "It also protects against contingencies such as a problem with any crew spacecraft, serious crew medical issues, or an emergency aboard the station that requires a crew and the vehicle they are assigned to return to Earth sooner than planned."
As expected, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio will fly alongside cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin on the Soyuz MS-22 mission, which is scheduled to launch on September 21 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Additionally, NASA's Loral O’Hara will fly along with cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub on the Soyuz MS-23 mission next spring.
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 12:30:33 +0000
Enlarge / Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin really knows how to fill out a hard hat. (credit: Yegor Aleyev / TASS via Getty Images)
8:30 am ET Friday Update: The Kremlin has made it official in a short communique—Dmitry Rogozin is out as director general of the country's state-owned space corporation, Roscosmos. The decree is effective immediately. Former Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov will replace Rogozin.
The moves come amid a significant shakeup in leadership posts in Russia nearly five months after the country's invasion of Ukraine. Borisov has followed the same path to Roscosmos as Rogozin, a demotion. Both men served as deputy prime ministers over Russia's space and defense industry before being moved to Roscosmos. It is not clear where Rogozin will land.
This brings an end to Rogozin's tumultuous career at Roscosmos, where he directly worked with the leaders of other international space agencies, including NASA and other International Space Station partners such as Europe, Canada, and Japan. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Rogozin has been increasingly bellicose and made numerous threats about Russian participation in the station. While most of those threats have ended up being hollow, they have damaged working relations with the West.
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 11:30:50 +0000
Enlarge / Europe's Vega-C rocket takes off from a spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana on Wednesday. (credit: European Space Agency)
Welcome to Edition 5.03 of the Rocket Report! It was a big week for small launch news, with a successful debut for Europe's Vega-C rocket, a responsive launch by Rocket Lab's Electron vehicle, and a big static fire test by ABL Space Systems' RS1 rocket. Congratulations to all involved in those projects.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Europe’s Vega-C rocket makes successful debut. Europe’s new Vega-C rocket made its debut flight on Wednesday, carrying an Italian physics satellite and six cubesats, Space News reports. The four-stage rocket launched from Kourou, French Guiana, at the end of a two-hour launch window. Technical issues had twice halted the countdown sequence. The successful mission means that Europe can now start to use the Vega-C rocket for operational launches, starting in November with the Pléiades Neo 5 and 6 Earth-imaging satellites. Arianespace says it has already sold seven Vega-C launches.
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 11:00:56 +0000
Enlarge (credit: Candela)
Three feet above the waves, the Candela P-12 sprints across Lake Mälaren near Stockholm, Sweden. With only its hydrofoils cutting through the water, the boat leaves virtually no wake, noise, or emissions—a sea change from the hulking diesel-powered ferries that currently haul commuters through the archipelago that makes up the Swedish capital.
So far, it's a water-bound fantasy: While Swedish startup Candela is already manufacturing leisure versions of its electric flying boats, the P-12 hasn't yet been built. Candela CEO Gustav Hasselskog says the boat is in the "design for manufacturing stage" ahead of a November launch that will be followed by a trial next year. The aim is to have the flying ferry form a part of Stockholm's public transport fleet.
Publish Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 10:15:28 +0000
Enlarge / The 2022 MacBook Air. (credit: Samuel Axon)
The new MacBook Air is a remix—a bundle of ideas already seen in other Apple laptops, whether we’re talking about the previous MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, or the 14-inch MacBook Pro.
In that sense, it’s not too exciting since we’ve seen most of its individual features before. But it is interesting in another sense: It’s the first major redesign in years to Apple’s most popular laptop, what we’ve previously called the best Mac laptop for most types of users.
This flat, plain, slate-like machine is also a clean slate for the storied MacBook Air, and it’s the first time the Air has been redesigned around the company’s own silicon. Apple has improved on the previous design in almost every way, even though the laptop loses a bit of its unique identity in the transition. It’s still the best MacBook for folks who are OK with paying its relatively high purchase price, but it's not a mandatory upgrade over its M1 predecessor.