Month: September 2022

Enlarge / Elon Musk arrives for the 2022 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 2, 2022, in New York. (credit: Getty Images | Angela Weiss)

Two weeks after Elon Musk made a commitment to buy Twitter for $44 billion, he wrote in a May 8 text message to one of his Morgan Stanley bankers that he was thinking of exiting the merger agreement due to the possibility of World War III.

"Let's slow down just a few days. Putin's speech tomorrow is really important. It won't make sense to buy Twitter if we're heading into World War III," Musk wrote to Morgan Stanley's head of global technology investment banking, Michael Grimes. Twitter lawyer Bill Savitt read the text out in a court hearing yesterday, multiple news reports said. In the May 9 speech, Russian President Vladimir Putin defended his invasion of Ukraine. The invasion began in February, two months before Musk's April 25 agreement to buy Twitter.

While Twitter called the Musk text a "money quotation," Musk lawyer Alex Spiro "said the characterization of the texts in court was 'utter nonsense as the full text chain shows.' The full text chain is expected to be filed on the court docket next week," Business Insider wrote. Spiro also "responded by saying that any businessman would be anxious about the impact of a potential war on the stock market," The Wall Street Journal wrote.

Enlarge / An example of the Monocraft font in action, which is based on Minecraft. (credit: Idrees Hassan)

North Carolina-based developer Idrees Hassan loves Minecraft so much that he recently created a monospaced font for programming based on the typeface found in the wildly popular video game. The result, Monocraft, gives programmers the feel of being in Minecraft without using any assets from the game itself.

"To be honest, I made this font because I thought it'd be fun to learn how fonts worked," Hassan told Ars. "Existing Minecraft fonts were missing a bunch of small details like proper kerning and pixel size, so I figured I should make my own. Once that was done, there was nothing stopping me from going overboard and turning it into a 'proper' programming font. Plus, now I can write Minecraft plugins in a Minecraft font!"

To adapt the Minecraft font for development purposes, Hassan redesigned characters to look better in a monospaced format, added a few serifs to make letters such as "i" and "l" easier to distinguish, created new programming ligature characters, and refined the arrow characters to make them easier to read. (Ligature characters combine popular operational character strings such as "!=" into a single new character, but they aren't always popular with developers.)

Enlarge / Artist's impression of Tebo 1 in life. (credit: Jose Garcia (Garciartist) and Griffith University.)

Archaeologists recently unearthed the remains of a young adult buried 31,000 years ago in a cave called Liang Tebo. Surprisingly, the person’s left leg ended a few inches above the ankle, with clean diagonal cuts severing the ends of the tibia and fibula (the two bones of the lower leg). This is the oldest evidence of surgical amputation ever found—and it suggests that the patient survived for years afterward.

Clear-cut evidence for Stone Age surgery

We don’t know the young person’s name (archaeologists have dubbed the patient Tebo 1), and the bones offer no clues about biological sex. What we do know is that injuries must have been a common fact of life in the young person’s community. Hunting, especially in mountainous terrain, is a dangerous way to make a living; the bones of Neanderthals and ancient members of our own species reveal that people got banged up fairly often during the Pleistocene.

Although falling rocks or the chomping jaws of a large animal can definitely remove a leg, that kind of trauma crushes or shatters the bone. It doesn’t leave neatly angled edges—and the smoothly sliced ends of Tebo 1’s leg bones look like the work of sharp instruments in skilled hands.

Enlarge / During the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, the city's African American Greenwood district was destroyed by white rioters. (credit: Universal History Archive / Getty Images)

On the night of May 31, 1921, a white mob descended on the affluent Black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The mob had gathered after the arrest of a Black teenager named Dick Rowland, who had been falsely accused of assaulting a white girl in an elevator. In one of the worst episodes of racial violence in US history, thousands of white vigilantes took to the streets of Greenwood with torches, guns, and bombs.

In a matter of hours, the rioters destroyed more than a thousand homes and hundreds of businesses across 35 blocks of the Greenwood district—so prosperous it was called “Black Wall Street.” Historians estimate that dozens to as many as 300 Black people were killed during the massacre. Some are believed to have been buried in unmarked graves. In 2020, the city of Tulsa finally began excavations to search for those graves. So far, archaeologists have exhumed 19 sets of human remains at a local cemetery that may be linked to the massacre.

Now, scientists working for the city have obtained enough usable DNA from two individuals to potentially learn their identities. The researchers say genetic material from these two people’s living descendants could help identify the nameless victims. “These people deserve their names. They deserve to be identified. Their families deserve to know who they are,” says Danny Hellwig, director of laboratory development for Intermountain Forensics, a nonprofit laboratory based in Utah hired by Tulsa officials to do the DNA analysis.

Enlarge (credit: Helge Thomas (CC-BY-2.0))

Ecotoxicologist Craig Downs describes his main work goal as “preventing zombies”—communities of coral or other marine creatures that appear to be thriving, but upon closer inspection, turn out to be composed only of adults lacking the ability to reproduce. These populations are like the “living dead,” a generation away from vanishing, according to scientists who discovered them in dying reefs across the Caribbean in 2016.

Globally, coral reefs are in decline for a number of reasons, including climate change, coastal development, and pollution. Over the years, Downs, executive director of Haereticus Environmental Laboratory in Virginia, has studied sunscreen, microplastics, and most recently, beach showers, in an effort to understand the effects of these human-made substances on some of the world's most popular vacation destinations. His latest study, published in July, could also breathe new life into an old law.

In April, the Clean Water Act, the keystone US law on water pollution, took what many environmentalists describe as a tough hit. In a controversial shadow docket decision, the Supreme Court voted to remove states’ power to block federally approved, but environmentally damaging, projects. Commentators decried the attempt to strip states of the right to protect their own waters, one of the core principles enshrined in the act.

Enlarge / Familiar Splatoon faces show up to usher players through a confusing, unsatisfying campaign. (credit: Nintendo)

In the crustacean-filled universe of Nintendo shooter series Splatoon, (sorry for the pun): Something fishy is going on.

I'm not sure what Nintendo was thinking with its push of Splatoon 3, this week's brand-new sequel, as a replacement for 2017's Splatoon 2. Where the last game added meaningful new weapons and modes to the series' quirky online modes, this year's new model adds a sprinkling of online-only content, which at best leaves the formula unperturbed and at worst is in dire need of rebalancing. And while Splatoon 2 and its 2018 expansion pack delivered some of the best solo campaign content of the Switch's generation, Splatoon 3's equivalent is a slapdash mess.

Thanks to limited pre-release online testing, I can't definitively review that half of the game, and I'm wondering how much of it can be redeemed with post-launch support. But I'm comfortable enough to say that Nintendo has dropped the ball for series fans and created an unwelcoming mess for newcomers.