Month: September 2022

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel/Getty Images)

Twitter has said Elon Musk’s own data scientists did not support his claim that the number of fake accounts on the social media platform is “wildly higher” than the company’s estimates, as the parties prepare to go to trial in October.

The Tesla chief executive is attempting to pull out of a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, arguing that it misled regulators and investors about the true number of fake and spam accounts on the platform, which he alleges far outstrips the 5 percent figure that Twitter has cited for years.

During a three-hour hearing in a Delaware court on Tuesday, Twitter’s lawyers said documents they had received during discovery showed that two different consultants hired by Musk, Cyabra and CounterAction, had produced estimates of the amount of spam on Twitter of 11 percent and 5 percent, respectively—figures broadly in line with Twitter’s public estimates.

Enlarge / A satellite image of Hurricane Ian as of 7:50 am ET on Wednesday. (credit: NOAA)

I have lived near the Texas coast for two decades and written about hurricanes professionally for nearly as long. When you do that, you think a lot about what would become of your home should the worst happen.

Well, the worst is happening in Southwest Florida today.

Hurricane Ian has undergone a remarkable period of intensification during the last 24 hours. After crossing the western end of Cuba and knocking that island nation's power grid offline, Ian started to weaken a bit Tuesday following this brief interaction with land. It also underwent an "eyewall replacement cycle," in which the centermost bands of the storm contract and are replaced by a new ring of storms farther out. Often this process temporarily weakens a storm, but Ian was hardly fazed.

Enlarge / On the last day of summer, fall colors contrast with the burnt landscape of the Cameron Peak Fire on Sept. 21, 2021, in Larimer County, Colorado. (credit: RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

When Stephanie Kampf visited one of her wildfire test plots near Colorado’s Joe Wright Reservoir in June of 2021, the charred remains of what had been a cool, shady spruce and fir forest before the Cameron Peak Fire incinerated it nearly took her breath away.

“We would walk through these burned areas and they were just black, nothing growing and already getting kind of hot,” she said. “And then you walk into an unburned patch, and there’d still be snow on the ground. You could almost breathe more.”

The surveys, up at about 10,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains west of Fort Collins, were part of a rapid response science assessment to measure just how much the extreme 2020 wildfire season in the West disrupted the water-snow cycle in the critical late-snowmelt zone that serves as a huge natural reservoir. The snowmelt sustains river flows that nurture ecosystems, fills irrigation ditches for crops, and delivers supplies of industrial and drinking water to communities.