Month: October 2022

Still reeling from the death of their king T'Challa, the people of Wakanda face a new threat from a feathered serpent god in the new trailer for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. It's the final film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Four, although technically, The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, slated for a December release on Disney+, will be the official conclusion.

As we've reported previously, Wakanda Forever was already in development when Chadwick Boseman—who played T'Challa in 2018's Black Panther—died of colon cancer in August 2020. Director Ryan Coogler, Marvel's Kevin Feige, and many others had been unaware that Boseman was ill. They decided not to recast T'Challa, nor would they try to insert the character using visual effects, although most of the other main cast members are returning. So the finished film is, in many ways, a tribute to Boseman.

There are plenty of familiar faces in Wakanda Forever. Per the official premise, "Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), Shuri (Letitia Wright), M'Baku (Winston Duke), Okoye (Danai Gurira), and the Dora Milaje (including Florence Kasumba) fight to protect their nation from intervening world powers in the wake of King T'Challa's death. As the Wakandans strive to embrace their next chapter, the heroes must band together with the help of War Dog Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o) and Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and forge a new path for the kingdom of Wakanda."

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  The Pixel 6a has a flat screen with a thicker-than-usual bezel on the bottom. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

The Pixel 7 might be arriving this week, but if you're not interested in any of that newfangled flagship stuff, have we got a deal for you! The Pixel 6a, Google's cheaper, simpler smartphone, is on sale at Amazon and Best Buy for $100 off. That makes for a pretty incredible $349 price tag instead of the normal $449. If you don't count bundling deals that require signing up for a new phone line, this is the lowest price we've seen the phone at.

The Pixel 6a is a dead simple 6.1-inch phone that covers all the basics. It has a 6.1-inch 1080p, 60 Hz display, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 4410 mAh battery. The phone has nearly every feature you could want, including an in-screen fingerprint reader, IP67 dust and water resistance, NFC, and Wi-Fi 6e compatibility. The biggest downside is that there's no wireless charging. The headline feature is the flagship-class SoC, the same Google Tensor chip you get in the Pixel 6, but for a low (and now even lower) price. The Tensor won't win any benchmark wars, but at this price, the only other comparable device is the iPhone SE.

As for why you might hold out a bit and get the Pixel 7 instead, you'd be getting a major screen upgrade if you buy the (probably $900) Pixel 7 Pro, which will pack a 6.7-inch 120 Hz display. You'd also be doubling the RAM (12GB) and upgrading the camera setup from the ancient IMX 363 sensor that powers the Pixel 6a. That would be more than double the price of this phone. though. Like we said in our review, if you're not a phone snob (guilty), the Pixel 6a is the perfect phone for normal people.

Enlarge / Kim Kardashian arrives to ABC's "Good Morning America" on September 20, 2022, in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | James Devaney )

Kim Kardashian will pay a $1.26 million penalty for touting a crypto security without disclosing that she was paid $250,000 to promote the token, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced today. Kardashian agreed to the payment to settle the charges and "agreed to not promote any crypto asset securities for three years," the SEC said.

"Kardashian's failure to disclose this compensation violated Section 17(b) of the Securities Act, which makes it unlawful for any person to promote a security without fully disclosing the receipt and amount of such consideration from an issuer," the SEC order said. This law is known as the "anti-touting" provision.

In June 2021, Kardashian promoted an EthereumMax offering on her Instagram account by posting an image containing the following text:

Enlarge / The real Bruce Willis at a film premiere in 2019. (credit: Getty Images)

On Friday, Ars Technica reported that Bruce Willis had sold his likeness for use in deepfakes, according to The Telegraph. Dozens of news sites repeated the Telegraph's claim. Over the weekend, the BBC discovered that Bruce Willis has "no partnership or agreement" with the firm Deepcake, which is based in Georgia, the Eurasian republic.

It's unclear how the inaccurate claim originated at The Telegraph. While reporting last Friday, we attempted to verify some of the claims in the original Telegraph article (such as Willis being the first actor to sell his deepfake rights), but we could not do so, and we noted that in the report. We also noted that Deepcake is doing business in America under a corporation registered in Delaware. However, we failed to follow through with verifying the entire claim, and we apologize for the error and for repeating the erroneous information.

Deepcake's website features Bruce Willis prominently in marketing materials. However, Willis' agent says, "Please know that Bruce has no partnership or agreement with this Deepcake company." (credit: Deepcake)

It's unclear if Deepcake ever had the rights to use Bruce Willis' likeness on its website or in its marketing materials. Deepcake told the BBC, "What he definitely did is that he gave us his consent (and a lot of materials) to make his Digital Twin." Deepcake also claims, per The Hollywood Reporter, that the company's involvement with Willis arrived through the Creative Artists Agency for use in a 2021 Russian cell phone commercial. However, Willis' representatives still deny having any involvement with the company.

Enlarge (credit: Karsten Möbius)

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to a single recipient on Monday: Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Pääbo's work will be familiar to regular readers of these pages, as he was the driving force behind the completion of the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes, and he has helped us understand how these lineages contributed to the genomes of modern humans. This has more to tell us about physiology and medicine than a casual glance might suggest.

Pääbo's central role in this story and his intense focus on this topic are likely to allow widespread acceptance of his sole-recipient status, despite the Nobels' long history of controversy over who gets acknowledged. But Pääbo also benefitted from being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, when a revolution in DNA sequencing technology provided the capabilities his ideas so sorely needed.

I briefly met Pääbo back in the 1990s when we were both working at Berkeley. He was already interested in old DNA and was working in one of the best labs for that sort of thing, run by the late Allan Wilson. PCR had been commercialized less than a decade earlier, and Wilson's lab was pushing the limits of the technique as a way of obtaining very old DNA that was a rare component of a sample that might have been in the environment for centuries or more—fragments of egg shells from the extinct moa birds made regular appearances in the lab at the time.

Enlarge (credit: Aaron Horowitz/Getty Images)

Three numbers.

Just three numbers—that’s all it takes to completely, unequivocally, 100 percent describe a black hole in general relativity. If I tell you the mass, electric charge, and spin (i.e., angular momentum) of a black hole, we’re done. That’s all we’ll ever know about it and all we’ll ever need to describe its features.

Those three numbers allow us to calculate everything about how a black hole will interact with its environment, how objects around it will respond to it, and how the black hole will evolve in the future.

Enlarge / Firefly Aerospace's Alpha rocket is seen on the pad ahead of the "To The Black" mission. (credit: Firefly)

Since SpaceX reached orbit for the first time in 2008 with the Falcon 1 rocket, a handful of other companies such as Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit have developed and successfully launched small, liquid-fueled rockets. But all of these boosters, including the Falcon 1, could lift, at most, a few hundred kilograms into low Earth orbit.

A newer generation of companies, however, has decided that their first rockets should be larger, capable of lifting about 1 metric ton, or a little bit more, to orbit. Officials with these companies have said that, in their view of the market, the micro-launchers just don't have enough lift capacity to meet the needs of today's satellite customers.

So these companies—such as Firefly Aerospace, Relativity Space, ABL Space Systems in the United States, and Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg in Europe—have pushed to develop a larger rocket as their first vehicle. And this weekend, the first of these companies, Firefly, reached orbit with its Alpha rocket.