Month: August 2020

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  Ignition! [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]

Just so we're clear about this, SpaceX built a Mars rocket out of rolls of steel.

In tents.

In South Texas.

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  Ignition! [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]

Just so we're clear about this, SpaceX built a Mars rocket out of rolls of steel.

In tents.

In South Texas.

Enlarge / Twitter drama erupted over the weekend when a much-beloved online persona supposedly died of COVID-19 complications—only to be exposed as a fake account/catfishing scheme by controversial neuroscientist and #MeTooSTEM founder BethAnn McLaughlin. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

A segment of science Twitter was rocked over the weekend by the discovery that a long-standing, pseudonymous online member had died of COVID-19-related complications. But grief quickly turned to shock, hurt, and anger when the deceased turned out to have never existed. Rather, it was a sock puppet account that we now know was created and maintained by BethAnn McLaughlin, a neuroscientist and founder of the #MeTooSTEM advocacy group whose Twitter handle is @McLNeuro.

"I take full responsibility for my involvement in creating the @Sciencing_Bi Twitter account," McLaughlin said in a statement provided to The New York Times through her lawyer. "My actions are inexcusable. I apologize without reservation to all the people I hurt. As I've reflected on my actions the last few days, it's become clear to me that I need mental health treatment, which I'm pursuing now. My failures are mine alone, so I'm stepping away from all activities with #MeTooSTEM to ensure that it isn't unfairly criticized for my actions."

This certainly isn't the first time a fake persona has manifested on social media. Way back in 2003, controversial American Enterprise Institute scholar John R. Lott Jr.. was outed by The Washington Post for creating a sock-puppet online persona, "Mary Rosh," purportedly a former student, and using it to mount spirited defenses of his work online. In 2017, there was the case of "Jenna Abrams," who boasted 70,000 Twitter followers; the fake persona was so convincing that she managed to spread a viral rumor that CNN's local Boston station had accidentally aired 30 minutes of pornography late one night in November 2016.

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  Hua Mulan (Liu Yifei) tries to be the perfect woman. [credit: Disney ]

After delisting Mulan from a potential theatrical run in June, Disney has firmed up its plans for its newest live-action remake. Starting September 4, Mulan will premiere exclusively on Disney+ in various territories, including the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, according to Disney CEO Bob Chapek.

Unlike other Disney+ streaming premieres, however, Mulan will launch with an extra price point on top of the service's $7/mo subscription rate. Paying Disney+ users in the US will have to fork over an additional $30 for what Chapek described as "premiere access," which likely equates to a temporary rental of the film instead of full-blown ownership a la platforms like iTunes and Amazon Video. Other territories' rates have not yet been confirmed. (Chapek took the opportunity to confirm that Disney+'s worldwide subscriber numbers are somewhere near 60.5 million.)

In certain territories that have not yet seen a Disney+ rollout, particularly China, Disney will move forward with a theatrical run of Mulan, which has yet to be given a release date.

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  This is our first proper look at the Gordon Murray Automotive T.50, the spiritual successor to the almighty McLaren F1 supercar from the mid-1990s. [credit: Gordon Murray Automotive ]

On Tuesday, Gordon Murray finally revealed his latest creation to the world. It's called the T.50, and in an age of heavy hybrid hypercars, near-instantaneous semiautomatic gearboxes, and driver-flattering electronic safety nets, it is a refreshing alternative with a minimum of electronic frippery; it even uses an H-pattern gearshift with an actual clutch pedal. But that makes sense when you consider Murray's last supercar: the McLaren F1. While many of us consider that car the greatest of all time, Murray disagrees—he describes the T.50 as improving on his mid-'90s masterpiece "in every conceivable way."

From the perspective of a car nerd of a certain age, Murray ranks up there with the greatest of the industry's greats. The bulk of his career was spent in Formula 1, where he designed cutting-edge, championship-winning cars for Brabham and then McLaren. After tiring of the racetrack, he turned his attention to detail to road-going sports cars, designing first the Light Car Company Rocket and then the McLaren F1, a three-seat V12 riot in carbon fiber that shattered records for acceleration, top speed, and list price, as well as blitzing the field in the 1995 24 Hours of Le Mans.

After leaving McLaren, he set his sights on making the process of building cars more sustainable and created a new production process called iStream that would allow cars to be made with 60 percent less energy. But he didn't forget about sports cars. Murray designed a new car for TVR, although frankly at this point, the odds seem remote that it will ever enter production. And he also decided to revisit the supercar, this time forming a company bearing his own name to build it.

Enlarge / Jim Farley, left, and Jim Hackett at a January 2019 Ford event. (credit: Jeff Kowalsky/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Ford has changed CEOs for the third time in six years, the company announced on Tuesday. Current CEO Jim Hackett will step down in October and be succeeded by his handpicked deputy, Chief Operating Officer Jim Farley.

Hackett made some significant changes to try to make Ford more profitable. Most dramatically, Hackett cancelled most of Ford's car lineup in the US so the company can focus on its more profitable trucks and SUVs. Ford then announced plans for $11 billion in new investments in electric and hybrid vehicles—even as it laid off almost 20 percent of its European workforce.

"We made some significant decisions in the earliest days that were quite controversial," Hackett said on a Tuesday conference call. "Getting out of the sedan business was a difficult question."

Enlarge (credit: Christine Wang)

The National Security Agency is recommending that some government workers and people generally concerned about privacy turn off find-my-phone, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth whenever those services are not needed as well as limit location data usage by apps.

“Location data can be extremely valuable and must be protected,” an advisory published on Tuesday stated. “It can reveal details about the number of users in a location, user and supply movements, daily routines (user and organizational), and can expose otherwise unknown associations between users and locations.”

NSA officials acknowledged that geolocation functions are enabled by design and are essential to mobile communications. The officials also admit that the recommended safeguards are impractical for most users. Mapping, location tracking of lost or stolen phones, automatically connecting to Wi-Fi networks, and fitness trackers and apps are just a few of the things that require fine-grained locations to work at all.