Month: August 2021

Enlarge / The Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft docked to the Rassvet module of the International Space Station's Russian segment. (credit: NASA)

On Friday afternoon, NASA pushed back on personal attacks made by Russia's state-owned news service against NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor.

"NASA astronauts, including Serena Auñón-Chancellor, are extremely well-respected, serve their country, and make invaluable contributions to the agency," said Kathy Lueders, chief of human spaceflight for NASA. "We stand behind Serena and her professional conduct. We do not believe there is any credibility to these accusations."

Shortly after Lueders tweeted this statement, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson concurred. "I whole-heartedly agree with Kathy’s statement," he said. "I fully support Serena and I will always stand behind our astronauts."

Enlarge / We wonder how the "revitalized" Quake will compare to this 2019 raytracing update of Quake II.

After two shiny, modernized updates to the venerable Doom franchise in recent years, it looks like Bethesda and fellow Zenimax subsidiary MachineGames (Wolfenstein: The New Order) are getting ready to announce a "revitalized edition" of Quake.

That tidbit comes by way of the recently posted schedule for Bethesda's virtual QuakeCon 2021, which will be streamed online next week. As noticed by Xbox Era (and still visible in this archived version), the schedule initially included a description for a "Let's talk Quake" session that mentioned participants will "discuss the additional content MachineGames have contributed to this revitalized edition [emphasis added]."

That line was scrubbed from the live version of the schedule sometime in the last 24 hours, implying that someone jumped the gun in mentioning the new "revitalized" edition. But the current listing still mentions that "Quake is back," which suggests we might hear an official announcement at the "QuakeCon Digital Welcome + Celebrating 25 Years of Quake with id Software and MachineGames" opening session on Thursday, August 19.

Enlarge / A healthcare worker receives a Pfizer-BioNtech Covid-19 vaccine at Jackson Memorial Hospital on December 15, 2020 in Miami, Florida. (credit: Getty Images | Joe Raedle )

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett yesterday rejected a request to block Indiana University's requirement that students be vaccinated against COVID-19.

"The case, Klaassen v. Trustees of Indiana University, was the first test of COVID-19 vaccine requirements to arrive at the Supreme Court," SCOTUSblog wrote. "The rule at the center of the case, announced in May by the university, requires all faculty, students, and staff to be vaccinated unless they qualify for a medical or religious exemption. Eight students went to federal court to challenge the constitutionality of the mandate, but on July 18 a federal district judge in Indiana rejected their request to block the mandate, and the US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit declined to put the mandate on hold while the litigation continues."

Students challenging the mandate asked for an emergency injunction that would block it, but the docket says that the application was "denied by Justice Barrett." Students claimed they have "a constitutional right to bodily integrity, autonomy, and of medical treatment choice in the context of a vaccination mandate" and that the university "is treating its students as children who cannot be trusted to make mature decisions." Barrett "rejected the plea without even asking the university for a response or getting her colleagues to weigh in," the Associated Press wrote.

Enlarge / Jay Y. Lee, leader of Samsung Group, speaks to members of the media as he is released from the Seoul Detention Center in Uiwang, South Korea, on Friday, Aug. 13, 2021.

Samsung Group's leader, Jay Y. Lee, is out of jail on parole today. Lee was serving a 30-month sentence for his role in "Choi-gate," a major 2016 South Korean political scandal that brought down South Korean then-President Park Geun-hye.

In 2017, Lee was originally sentenced to five years in jail after being found guilty of bribery, embezzlement, capital flight, and perjury charges. An appeal and re-trial cut Lee's five-year prison sentence down to 30 months after suspending the charges for bribery and embezzlement. Lee served 18 months of that sentence, and now he's out on parole.

Choi-gate is an incredible rabbit hole you can dive into at the above Wikipedia link, but the basics are that it is named for Choi Soon-Sil, a shamanistic cult member and a woman often called "Korean Rasputin," due to her influence over South Korea's then-President. Lee was accused of bribing Choi to get a favorable ruling from Park related to a 2015 merger of two Samsung affiliates, Samsung C&T Corp (that's "Construction & Trading") and Cheil Industries, a Korean textile firm.

Enlarge / Reconstruction of the orthocone ammonite Baculites compressus. A new study reveals that the creatures likely lived a vertically oriented lifestyle. (credit: David Peterman)

The fossil record is chock-full of the fossilized remains of spiral-shelled ammonoids, whose shapes are reminiscent of rams' horns. But there was another type of ammonoid with long, straight, uncoiled shells, known as orthocones, that particularly flourished during the early Paleozoic. Prior reconstructions have depicted these creatures as being horizontal swimmers, similar to today's squid.

But a new investigation that involved dropping 3D-printed models into water tanks reveals that most species of orthocones would not have been able to swim well horizontally. Instead, the creatures likely led a vertically oriented lifestyle, moving leisurely up and down through the water column to hunt and sometimes executing rapid upward dodges as needed to avoid predators, according to a recent paper published in the journal PeerJ.

Co-authors David Peterman and Kathleen Ritterbush are paleontologists at the University of Utah. They previously developed digital models of ammonoids with coiled shells to investigate the evolution and lifestyle of these creatures. This time, they've turned their attention to a species of orthocone cephalopods (Baculites compressus) that lived during the Cretaceous Period. The authors hypothesized that there must be some adaptive benefit to having a straight shell, since the spiral shell of the orthoconic ammonoids has evolved several times in different lineages found in the fossil record.

Enlarge / A Hyundai Nexo patrol car at a hydrogen filling station in Lower Saxony, Germany. (credit: Friso Gentsch/picture alliance)

Gas companies and utilities are in a pickle. Their entire business model relies on the extraction, transport, and combustion of methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases known to humankind. With many countries aiming to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, these companies face an uncertain future. 

One solution they’ve proposed is slipping hydrogen into their distribution lines, either partially or fully replacing natural gas, so that people can burn it to heat their homes or generate electricity. When produced using solar and wind power, hydrogen is a zero-carbon fuel, and while refitting natural gas infrastructure would be expensive, it would give gas-only utilities a reason to exist.

The problem is that producing so-called “green” hydrogen is expensive and will remain so for a decade or more, according to forecasts.

Enlarge / Apple executive Craig Federighi speaks during the 2018 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Jose, California. (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan)

Apple's decision to have iPhones and other Apple devices scan photos for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has sparked criticism from security experts and privacy advocates—and from some Apple employees. But Apple believes its new system is an advancement in privacy that will "enabl[e] a more private world," according to Craig Federighi, the company's senior VP of software engineering.

Federighi defended the new system in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, saying that Apple is aiming to detect child sexual abuse photos in a way that protects user privacy more than other, more invasive scanning systems. The Journal wrote today:

While Apple's new efforts have drawn praise from some, the company has also received criticism. An executive at Facebook Inc.'s WhatsApp messaging service and others, including Edward Snowden, have called Apple's approach bad for privacy. The overarching concern is whether Apple can use software that identifies illegal material without the system being taken advantage of by others, such as governments, pushing for more private information—a suggestion Apple strongly denies and Mr. Federighi said will be protected against by "multiple levels of auditability."

"We, who consider ourselves absolutely leading on privacy, see what we are doing here as an advancement of the state of the art in privacy, as enabling a more private world," Mr. Federighi said.

In a video of the interview, Federighi said, "[W]hat we're doing is we're finding illegal images of child pornography stored in iCloud. If you look at any other cloud service, they currently are scanning photos by looking at every single photo in the cloud and analyzing it. We wanted to be able to spot such photos in the cloud without looking at people's photos and came up with an architecture to do this." The Apple system is "much more private than anything that's been done in this area before," he said.