Month: October 2020

Enlarge / Amanda Collin stars as Mother in Raised by Wolves: a deadly Android reprogrammed to raise human children on the virgin planet Kepler-22b to establish an atheist civilization. (credit: HBO Max)

A pair of androids struggle to raise human children on a hostile planet in Raised by Wolves, the new sci-fi series that just concluded its first season on HBO Max. In this era of bankable franchises, reboots, and adaptations, it was refreshing to see something so original and visionary hit the small screen, and we had high hopes for the series.

That hope was sadly misplaced. Granted, in its earlier episodes, Raised by Wolves is moody, atmospheric, strangely disquieting, and thought-provoking, with gorgeous cinematography. So it's especially maddening that the show squanders all that considerable promise with a clunky, incoherent finale featuring a hackneyed, ham-fisted, totally unnecessary twist that left us seriously questioning whether we even want to tune in for a second season.

(Spoilers below, but all major reveals about the finale—because WTAF?—are below the gallery and we'll give a heads up when we get there.)

Enlarge / US President Donald Trump holds a protective mask during the first US presidential debate hosted by Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, US, on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Update 10/2/2020, 5:30pm: Trump is reportedly leaving the White House and going to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in nearby Bethesda, Maryland. In a statement, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, “Out of an abundance of caution, and at the recommendation of his physician and medical experts, the president will be working from the presidential offices at Walter Reed for the next few days."

Update 10/2/2020, 4:45pm: Trump is reportedly experiencing low-grade fever, nasal congestion and a cough from his coronavirus infection. The White House released a statement from physician Sean Conley, who is treating the president, saying that Trump has received a high dose (8 grams) of an experimental antibody cocktail made by Regeneron. This week, Regeneron issued a press release stating that such high doses of its antibody cocktail appeared to cause virus levels to decrease more quickly in patients who were not hospitalized for their infection. The full data has not been published or released and the information available so far is not enough to determine if the treatment is effective.

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  Pierre Gasly stands on his Alpha Tauri racing car after winning the 2020 Italian Grand Prix. So far it is Honda's only F1 win of the year. [credit: Red Bull ]

On Friday morning in Tokyo, the Honda Motor Company shocked the world of Formula 1 by announcing it has decided to leave the sport at the end of 2021. The decision was explained in a speech by Honda President and CEO Takahiro Hachigo:

At this time, Honda made a decision to further accelerate such initiatives and strive for "the realization of carbon neutrality by 2050" in order to realize a sustainable society. To this end, our current goal of "electrifying two-thirds of our global automobile unit sales in 2030" will become a checkpoint we must pass before we get to the 2050 goal, and therefore we must further accelerate the introduction of our carbon-free technologies.

Instead of spending $164 million (€140 million) a year on an F1 engine program, Honda will instead devote those resources to carbon-free technology for road cars, including battery and fuel cell electric vehicles. A Honda Formula E program has already been ruled out, but we believe the IndyCar program will continue unchanged, given that it's funded by the American Honda Motor Company.

By my count, this is the fifth time that the Japanese automaker has quit F1; it contested the sport as a manufacturer of its own car and engine between 1964-1968 and from 2006-2008 and as just an engine supplier to other teams in the 1980s, 2000s, and then again since 2015.

Enlarge (credit: Cathy)

With the final tallies done, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) released its energy-related CO₂ emissions data for 2019 on Wednesday. This includes all fossil fuel combustion for generating electricity, heating buildings, industrial processes, and transportation. Overall, EIA puts last year's total at 2.8 percent less than 2018 and equal to the emissions of 2017.

In 2018, US emissions ticked upward by around three percent. This was due, in part, to weather conditions that drove higher demand for both heating and cooling. Transportation emissions were also up, which has been a continuing trend since the last economic recession.

Overall emissions went back down in 2019 for a mix of reasons. (Last December’s edition of an annual global emissions study projected that 2019 US emissions would drop around 1.7 percent, so EIA’s numbers are slightly better.) These emissions are a combination of some long-term trends, combined with year-to-year variations.

Enlarge / A 2018 Nikola video showed the Nikola One prototype rolling down a shallow hill in Utah. Nikola now says it never claimed the truck was driving under its own power. (credit: Nikola)

Nikola has issued copyright-takedown notices targeting critics on YouTube who used clips of the promotional video in which a Nikola prototype truck was seen rolling down a hill.

Nikola last month admitted that the promotional video of a supposedly functional Nikola One electric truck moving along a highway actually consisted of the company's vehicle rolling downhill. This week, Nikola "forced the removal of several critical videos from YouTube, saying they infringed its copyright by using footage from the company," including the truck-rolling-downhill video, the Financial Times reported yesterday.

Sam Alexander is one of at least two financial commentators who had videos removed by Google subsidiary YouTube at Nikola's request. He says that four of his videos were taken down.

Enlarge / Amazon.com Inc. signage is displayed in front of a warehouse in Staten Island, New York, US, on Tuesday, March 31, 2020. (credit: Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

Amazon on Thursday released high-level data on COVID-19 infection rates among its warehouse and in-store workers, saying that almost 20,000 "front-line" employees contracted COVID-19 between March 1 and mid-September.

Of 1.37 million people who worked either in Amazon distribution facilities or in Whole Foods stores during that period, 19,816—or about 1.44 percent—have had COVID-19, Amazon said. The company released the number in the context of a corporate blog post boasting of success with its mitigation measures.

"If the rate among Amazon and Whole Foods Market employees were the same as it is for the general population rate, we estimate that we would have seen 33,952 cases among our workforce," Amazon wrote. "In reality, 19,816 employees have tested positive or been presumed positive for COVID-19—42% lower than the expected number." The calculations do not include Prime delivery drivers, most of whom technically are not Amazon employees.