Month: December 2018

Enlarge / Benedict Cumberbatch will reprise his role as Doctor Strange, despite the events of Avengers: Infinity War. (credit: Marvel Studios)

Avengers: Endgame doesn't hit theaters for several months, but sources have told The Hollywood Reporter that a Doctor Strange sequel is already in the works.

Spoilers follow for Avengers: Infinity War and Doctor Strange.

Sure, the good doctor was dusted along with half of all living things in the universe in Avengers: Infinity War. We never believed they were all truly gone for good, and this news confirms it. Marvel, however, declined to comment.

Enlarge / Exterior view of the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, on Thursday, July 26, 2018. (credit: Mason Trinca / Washington Post via Getty Images)

A doctor who once worked for a Fremont, California, medical clinic contracted to treat injured workers at Tesla's nearby factory has just lost his medical license.

Dr. Muhannad Hafi—who was employed by a small medical company called Access Omnicare until at least January 2018—was found to have sexually fondled two female patients in 2014 and 2016 when he worked at two other medical clinics. The two women were not connected to Tesla. The court order to revoke his license will be effective as of 5pm Pacific Time on December 21, 2018.

However, the revocation of Hafi's medical license raises questions about the practices of Access Omnicare, which Tesla selected to oversee its on-site clinic since June 2018. Prior to that, Access Omnicare was contracted to see and treat injured Tesla factory workers off-site at its local Fremont office.

Enlarge / Exterior view of the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, on Thursday, July 26, 2018. (credit: Mason Trinca / Washington Post via Getty Images)

A doctor who once worked for a Fremont, California, medical clinic contracted to treat injured workers at Tesla's nearby factory has just lost his medical license.

Dr. Muhannad Hafi—who was employed by a small medical company called Access Omnicare until at least January 2018—was found to have sexually fondled two female patients in 2014 and 2016 when he worked at two other medical clinics. The two women were not connected to Tesla. The court order to revoke his license will be effective as of 5pm Pacific Time on December 21, 2018.

However, the revocation of Hafi's medical license raises questions about the practices of Access Omnicare, which Tesla selected to oversee its on-site clinic since June 2018. Prior to that, Access Omnicare was contracted to see and treat injured Tesla factory workers off-site at its local Fremont office.

Artist's rendering of a rocket car screaming across the desert. (credit: Bloodhound SSC)

Sad news, everyone. Bloodhound SSC, the British project to shatter the land speed record, is dead. Breaking the 1,000mph barrier with a ground vehicle is neither an easy feat nor a cheap one, and it was the funding side of things that proved to be an insurmountable hurdle.

This was not entirely unexpected news. In October, we reported that the project had entered administration, which is the UK counterpart to bankruptcy, due to a lack of funds. Six weeks later, the administrators have been unable to find anyone able to raise the $31 million (£25 million) necessary to take this extraordinary vehicle out to the specially prepared stretch of the Hakskeenpan in South Africa to begin building up to speed.

Rocket engine jet engine rocket engine jet engine

We first met Bloodhound SSC back in 2014. It was the brainchild of Richard Noble, who set a new land speed record in 1982 with Thrust 2 before spearheading the Thrust SSC program, which broke the sound barrier on land with RAF Wing Commander Andy Green behind the wheel in 1997.

Enlarge / Google Chrome in macOS Mojave. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple added dark mode to macOS with its Mojave software update on September. Since then, third-party apps have been adding dark themes to go along with it, but there have been a handful of notable outliers, like Slack and Google Chrome. We've now learned that the latter of those will get a formal dark mode in an upcoming release, likely Chrome 73.

As noted on Reddit and reported by MacRumors, a code change was submitted to Chromium on December 5 that lays the groundwork for the future public release. Here are the notes on the change from the Chromium issue page:

Mac: Change dark mode optout logic and respond to system changes

This change hooks up the "DarkMode" feature, allowing for three states
in Mojave:
- --force-dark-mode for dark appearance unconditionally
- --enable-feature=DarkMode to track system dark mode status
- No flags/default state is light appearance unconditionally

Since we build with an SDK < 10.14, we still need the Info.plist
key, but it now must be false.

Some related changes:
- Make Omnibox tint respond to OnNativeThemeChanged
- React immediately to changes in high-contrast mode setting

Chromium is the first stop for changes to Chrome, with more steps along the way like the beta release, before the changes finally make it to the public release. Even in Chromium, the feature requires digging into code to activate, so this is early along. But dark mode is clearly on the way.

Enlarge / A letter posted by Supermicro executives today announcing that an audit had found no evidence of claims of espionage implants in the company's servers, part of a campaign by the company to counter a report by Bloomberg in October.

In a letter to customers issued December 11, Supermicro President and CEO Charles Liang and other top executives announced that an audit conducted by an outside investigating team had found no evidence of any malicious hardware incorporated into motherboards currently or previously manufactured by the company. The letter is the latest rebuttal to Bloomberg reports in October that claimed tiny chips that provided a backdoor for China's intelligence agencies had been integrated into boards provided to major Internet and cloud providers—a report also refuted by the companies the report claimed were targeted.

"After a thorough examination and a range of functional tests, the investigative firm found absolutely no evidence of malicious hardware on our motherboards," the letter signed by Liang, Supermicro Senior Vice President and Chief Compliance Officer David Weigland, and Senior VP and Chief Product Officer Raju Penumatcha stated. "These findings were no surprise to us... We appreciate the industry support regarding this matter from many of our customers, like Apple and AWS. We are also grateful for numerous senior government officials, including representatives of the Department of Homeland Security, the director of National Intelligence, and the director of the FBI, who early on appropriately questioned the truth of the media reports."

Reuters' Joseph Menn reported that the audit was apparently undertaken by Nardello & Co, a global investigative firm founded by former US federal prosecutor Daniel Nardello. According to Reuters' source, the firm examined sample motherboards that Supermicro had sold to Apple and Amazon, as well as software and design files for products. No malicious hardware was found in the audit, and no beacons or other network transmissions that would be indicative of a backdoor were detected in testing.

Enlarge / The dome of the United State Capitol Building in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Phil Roeder)

Legislation to restore net neutrality rules now has 180 supporters in the US House of Representatives, but that's 38 votes short of the amount needed before the end of the month.

The Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution, already approved by the Senate, would reverse the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules. But 218 signatures from US representatives (a majority) are needed to force a full vote in the House before Congress adjourns at the end of the year.

Net neutrality advocates previously said they needed 218 signatures by December 10 to force a vote. But an extension of Congress' session provided a little more time.

Enlarge / The middle image shows the painting as it now appears, with close-ups of four centuries of damage and wear on the right. The asterisks mark the locations of Caselli and her colleagues' samples. (credit: CC BY license, with permission from )

A new study describes the complex ecosystems of bacteria and fungi that live and feast on a 17^th-century painting—and how other species of bacteria may one day help art conservators fight back.

If you could zoom in for a microscopic look at an oil painting on canvas, you would see many thin, overlapping layers of pigments—powdered bits of insects, plants, or minerals—held together with oils or glue made from animal collagens. Many of those pigments and binding materials are surprisingly edible to bacteria and fungi. Each patch of color and each layer of paint and varnish in an oil painting offers a different microbial habitat. So when you look at a painting, you’re not just looking at a work of art; you’re looking at a whole ecosystem.

Microbes’ artistic taste

To better understand these microscopic art vandals, University of Ferrara microbiologist Elisabetta Caselli and her colleagues turned to a Renaissance painting called “Incoronazione della Virgine,” by painter Carlo Bononi. The painting once adorned the ceiling of the Basilica of Santa Maria in Vado, Italy. When an earthquake damaged the church in 2012, staff took down the 2.8 meter (9.18 foot) round canvas from where it had hung since 1620 and leaned it against the wall in an inner niche of the church.