Month: February 2021

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Lucasfilm)

Gina Carano's turbulent tenure as a member of the Star Wars acting universe has come to an abrupt end.

Lucasfilm issued a statement to the press on Wednesday, which Ars first found on io9, confirming that Carlano was out of not just The Mandalorian, on which she co-starred for two seasons, but all Star Wars properties. It read:

Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.

The phrasing implies that Carano's relationship with Disney and Lucasfilm may have ended before her most recent high-profile post on social media: an Instagram "story" quoting an anti-mask podcast's post that compared Nazi "rounding up" of Jews during the Holocaust to "hating someone for their political views." The same post, from this Tuesday evening, implied that Jews were somehow more subject to violence by "neighbors" than by Nazis—without citing a nation, era, or other clarification about the point being made.

Enlarge / Self-sewn protective face masks in a fabric store on April 3, 2020, in Jena, Germany. (credit: Getty | Jens Schlueter)

With the pandemic still raging and several dangerous variants looming, many experts have suggested doubling up on masks. Now, a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doubles down on that strategy.

Adding a cloth mask over a surgical mask on a rubbery dummy head more than doubled particle blocking when the dummy simulated coughing—aka spewing particles capable of carrying coronavirus—the study found. Specifically, a surgical mask or a cloth mask alone blocked about 42 to 44 percent of particles, respectively, coming out of the coughing dummy. The combo of a cloth mask over a surgical mask blocked 92.5 percent of the risky particles.

Next, the CDC researchers gave the rubbery dummy head an equally disembodied friend, spaced about two meters (six feet) away in a cozy, unventilated experimental chamber. When one of the heads quietly belched aerosol particles (source) while maskless, the researchers measured the dose of particles that the companion (receiver) took in during a 15-minute period. Wearing a surgical mask alone cut the receivers’ exposure to particles by just 7.5 percent, compared to wearing no mask. Wearing a double mask cut the exposure by 83 percent.

Enlarge / The Antigravity battery in place, with the Bluetooth monitor dongle. (credit: Bradley Iger)

From iPhones to Teslas, lithium-ion battery technology is ubiquitous in today's world. It's the chemistry of choice for a wide range of applications due to its high charge density relative to its mass, which in turn yields things like high-end laptops that can run for more than 10 hours on a single charge while weighing less than four pounds.

But what about that lead-acid lump hanging out in your car's engine bay? The origins of that battery date back to the mid-19th century, and yet even today you'll still find this archaic tech serving up electrons in the vast majority of vehicles on the road—including EVs.

In recent years, some automakers have started to make lithium-ion starter batteries available in their vehicles, but the batteries have largely been limited to expensive optional offerings in high-end sports cars from companies like Porsche and McLaren. Antigravity is looking to change that.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images / Leon Justice)

The Florida water treatment facility whose computer system experienced a potentially hazardous computer breach last week used an unsupported version of Windows with no firewall and shared the same TeamViewer password among its employees, government officials have reported.

The computer intrusion happened last Friday in Oldsmar, a Florida city of about 15,000 that’s roughly 15 miles northwest of Tampa. After gaining remote access to a computer that controlled equipment inside the Oldsmar water treatment plant, the unknown intruder increased the amount of sodium hydroxide—a caustic chemical better known as lye—by a factor of 100. The tampering could have caused severe sickness or death had it not been for safeguards the city has in place.

Beware of lax security

According to an advisory from the state of Massachusetts, employees with the Oldsmar facility used a computer running Windows 7 to remotely access plant controls known as a SCADA—short for “supervisory control and data acquisition”—system. What’s more, the computer had no firewall installed and used a password that was shared among employees for remotely logging into city systems with the TeamViewer application

Enlarge / An artist's rendering of Archer's first aircraft, due out in 2024. (credit: Archer)

The success of uncrewed electric drones in the last couple of decades has caused some people to wonder if similar construction techniques to those used in drones could be employed to create small electric aircraft to carry people.

Not only are electric motors more reliable than conventional engines, but they're also light enough that you can put several of them on a single aircraft, offering an extra margin of safety. The ability to use several motors—together with sophisticated software—means greater design flexibility, opening the door to new types of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft that straddle the line between conventional airplane and helicopter.

This technology got overhyped in the late 2010s. Uber, for example, announced in 2017 that it was aiming to launch a VTOL taxi service in Dallas and Dubai in 2020. Instead, Uber sold off its air taxi efforts to startup Joby in December 2020.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Andrzej Wojcicki)

Large numbers of US Internet subscribers are using over 1TB a month for the first time as the pandemic continues to boost home-Internet usage, according to research released today by the vendor OpenVault.

"The power user category continue[d] to accelerate [in Q4 2020], with 14.1 percent of weighted average subscribers now consuming over 1TB of data per month, up 94 percent from 2019," OpenVault's report said. In Q4 2019, 7.3 percent of US-based subscribers used over 1TB. (The weighted figures include both users with data caps and users with unlimited plans.)

The 14.1 percent figure is also a big jump from Q3 2020, when OpenVault research found that 8.8 percent of broadband subscribers used at least 1TB per month. The 1TB figure is significant because AT&T and other ISPs impose monthly data caps of 1TB or less. Comcast raised its cap to 1.2TB starting in mid-2020, while Cox's is now up to 1.25TB. People using 1TB on a capped service are at risk of paying overage fees, which generally cost $10 for each additional block of 50GB.