Month: November 2021

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

In September, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that Apple must allow iOS developers to direct users to external content-purchasing mechanisms outside of the App Store's built-in In-App Purchases. Tuesday night, Rogers refused Apple's request to stay that ruling, setting the stage for it to go into effect Dec. 9 pending further appeal.

In a blunt four-page ruling, Judge Rogers said Apple's motion for a stay, filed last month, is "fundamentally flawed" and "based on a selective reading of this Court’s findings and ignores all of the findings which supported the injunction, namely incipient antitrust conduct including supercompetitive commission rates resulting in extraordinarily high operating margins and which have not been correlated to the value of its intellectual property."

Apple's anti-steering provisions, which prevent app makers from telling users about alternate payment methods inside of the apps themselves, "are one of the key provisions upon which Apple has been able to successfully charge supracompetitive commissions untethered to its intellectual property," Judge Rogers writes. Those provisions depress royalty rates for Epic's Unreal Engine specifically and "in the industry generally" she continues.

Enlarge / The Orion spacecraft for NASA’s Artemis I mission is lifted above the Space Launch System rocket in the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center. (credit: NASA)

Senior NASA officials on Tuesday provided an updated timeline for returning humans to the Moon under the agency's Artemis Program, and they discussed costs and other issues related to it. The biggest news came in the form of NASA's formal acknowledgement that a human landing on the Moon in 2024 is not possible, but there were plenty of other noteworthy tidbits.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson led the briefing with space reporters, which came five days after the US Court of Federal Claims ruled against Blue Origin's lawsuit against NASA for its selection of SpaceX to build a lunar lander for the Artemis Program. Previously, Nelson had promised to provide an update on the Artemis Program following the lawsuit, and on Tuesday he made good on that.

He came out guns blazing at Blue Origin. "We've lost nearly seven months in litigation and that likely has pushed the first human landing likely to no earlier than 2025," Nelson said, pinning the delay in NASA's return to the Moon firmly on Blue Origin and its lawyers. During the legal process, NASA was forbidden from working or even talking with SpaceX regarding the Human Landing System (HLS) program. The agency was also unable to provide milestone payments.

Asian honeybees (Apis cerana) produce a unique alarm sound to alert hive members to an attack by giant "murder hornets," according to a new paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. For the first time, scientists at Wellesley College have documented these so-called "anti-predator pipes," which serve as clarion calls to the hive members to initiate defensive maneuvers. You can hear a sampling in the (rather disturbing) video, embedded above, of bees under a hornet attack.

“The [antipredator] pipes share traits in common with a lot of mammalian alarm signals, so as a mammal hearing them, there's something that is instantly recognizable as communicating danger,” said co-author Heather Mattila of Wellesley College, who said the alarm signals gave her chills when she first heard them. “It feels like a universal experience.”

As I've written previously, so-called murder hornets rocketed to infamy after November 2019, when a beekeeper in Blaine, Washington, named Ted McFall, was horrified to discover thousands of tiny mutilated bodies littering the ground—an entire colony of his honeybees had been brutally decapitated. The culprit: the Asian giant hornet species Vespa mandarinia, native to Southeast Asia and parts of the Russian Far East. Somehow, these so-called "murder hornets" had found their way to the Pacific Northwest, where they now pose a dire ecological threat to North American honeybee populations.