Month: May 2016

(credit: "Kraftwerk Volkswagen VW" by Kintaiyo)

According to the Financial Times, Norway's gigantic sovereign wealth fund is planning to join the class-action lawsuit filed against Volkswagen Group in Germany. The lawsuit concerns VW Group's emissions shenanigans—the company was caught falsifying emissions tests for its diesel engines in the US and around the world.

The German class-action lawsuit is just one of a number that VW Group is facing. Here in the US, the automaker is facing more than 600 lawsuits, which are being overseen collectively by US District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco. Last month we reported that as part of that legal action, the automaker has agreed to buy back more than 500,000 cars with the affected 2.0L diesel engine.

The scandal hasn't been good for VW Group's bottom line, either. In April, the company released a delayed financial report showing it had lost $6.2 billion in 2015.

(credit: JOHN THYS/AFP/Getty Images)

Google could be hit with a fine as high as $3 billion (~£2.09 billion) in the European Commission's long-running antitrust case against the ad giant's alleged abuse of dominance in the search market.

The Telegraph reported the potential record-breaking multi-billion penalty on Sunday, but noted that the figure hadn't been decided yet.

Sources have similarly told Ars that Google could be whacked with a fine in June, after it was formally charged in April 2015 with favouring its own shopping comparison products over those of its rivals in the European Union.

Statue of the late cosmonaut Gherman Titov. (credit: Senza Senso)

The recklessness and bravado of the first seven Mercury astronauts are immortalized in the 1979 Tom Wolfe book (and 1983 film) The Right Stuff. You'd think the Soviet space program wouldn't have tolerated such misbehavior—early cosmonauts were supposed to represent the superiority of the Communist system, after all—but you'd be wrong. And this reality is best understood through the story of Gherman Stepanovich Titov, the Soviet Union's second man in space.

Decades before astronauts and cosmonauts made months-long jaunts to the International Space Station (ISS), Titov was the Soviets' first “long-haul” space traveler. To this day, he remains the youngest person to have flown in space. Just one month shy of his 26th birthday and nearly two years before Gordon Cooper's day-long Faith 7 flight, Titov spent over a day in space. This milestone came during his August 1961 Vostok 2 mission (call sign: Oryel, or Eagle), covering a then-staggering 17-and-a-half orbits. He traversed over 700,000 kilometers—430,000+ miles—which is nearly the distance from the Earth to the Moon. His achievement proved humans were able to survive this sort of travel in space.

But there's more to this cosmonaut than just long distances and world records. With his healthy supply of attitude, Gherman Titov embodied the youthful, rebellious spirit that drove both the early US and Soviet space programs. He didn't emerge unscathed from the vices of his youth, but he eventually matured into an elder statesman of space and is responsible for Cosmonautics Day, observed in Russia on April 12 to commemorate the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic first spaceflight.

(credit: flickr user: Beckie)

There's no one single cause that drives us to strap on a tinfoil hat—instead, a variety of factors interact with each other to push us in that direction. A recent paper in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences reports a correlation between stress and conspiracy theory belief, suggesting that a very common experience could be one of these factors.

It’s possible that believing in conspiracy theories could make people more stressed, says Pascal Wagner-Egger, a conspiracy belief researcher who wasn’t involved in this paper. “Conspiracy theories are not very reassuring beliefs,” he points out. But the authors of the study think it’s likely that causality runs in the other direction here—that stress makes people predisposed to believing in conspiracy theories.

Untangling the knot

It’s pretty difficult to do an experiment on the causality of conspiracy theories; it’s not like you're likely to get useful information by asking people what they think about the Moon landing, stressing them out, and then asking again. It’s possible that a long-term study could track the development of beliefs alongside stressful life changes like job loss, but longitudinal studies like these are difficult and expensive. That means correlational studies, despite their limitations, are the low-hanging fruit for early exploration.