Month: December 2022

Enlarge (credit: Chesnot / Contributor | Getty Images Europe)

In the past two weeks, United States lawmakers have increasingly restricted access to China-owned TikTok on government-managed devices. TikTok is one of the most popular apps in the world. Most recently, state agencies in Louisiana and West Virginia yesterday implemented new bans to prevent TikTok from tracking government employees or censoring their content. According to Reuters, that brings the total up to 19 out of 50 US states that have “at least partially blocked access on government computers to TikTok.”

It seems that states are taking what actions they can to protect US data, as, for months, President Joe Biden has seemingly dragged his feet after reportedly coming close to completing a deal with TikTok that would prevent a nationwide ban from wrenching the popular app out of the hands of 100 million Americans. Now news outlets report that it’s unlikely that Biden will seal that deal before the year ends. The New York Times reported that the deal’s terms are “unlikely to satisfy anyone.”

While Biden ponders his potential agreement, Congress seems just as ready as states to move more aggressively against TikTok. Just today, Congress introduced a new spending proposal that included a plan to restrict TikTok access for all federal employees on all government devices. Last week, the Senate voted to approve a similar ban restricting all federal employee access to the app. Reuters reported that this week, the US House of Representatives would have to approve that bill before passing it on to Biden. Even more aggressively, last week, Congress also introduced bipartisan legislation that went even further, seeking to ban TikTok for all users nationwide, citing national security concerns.

Enlarge (credit: Cultura RF/Alexander Semenov)

In the past, scientists thought of the deep ocean as a cold, dead place. While the region—generally considered to be everything between 200 and 11,000 meters in depth—is undoubtedly cold, it actually holds unexpected biodiversity.

“Back in the 1970s, there was this myth of the deep sea as this empty desert wasteland with nothing alive. For many years, we’ve known this is absolutely false,” Julia Sigwart, a researcher at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany, told Ars.

However, the abyss and the life within it remain poorly understood, despite making up around three-quarters of the area covered by the ocean. At this year’s United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15), Sigwart and her international colleagues presented a policy brief that urges more support for research into the biodiversity of the deep ocean, particularly as the region begins to be threatened by human activities.

Enlarge / Apple's 2019 Mac Pro, a trypophobe's nightmare. (credit: Apple)

The Mac Pro is one of the few remaining Intel Macs with no Apple Silicon replacement ready to go, even though we're a little past the two-year deadline that CEO Tim Cook originally set for the transition back in the summer of 2020 (and to be fair, it has been a very hard-to-predict couple of years).

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple continues to work on a new version of the Mac Pro, alongside other as-yet-unreplaced Intel Macs like the higher-end Mac mini and the 27-inch iMac, but that a planned "M2 Extreme" chip that would have powered the Apple Silicon Mac Pro has "likely" been canceled.

The Extreme would have strapped two M2 Ultra chips together, in the same way that the current M1 Ultra is a pair of interconnected M1 Max chips, but as of this writing Apple allegedly plans to ship the new Mac Pro with an M2 Ultra chip inside and focus on "easy expandability for additional memory, storage, and other components" to help the Mac Pro stand out from the existing Mac Studio.

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Today, Lenovo announced upcoming updates to its ThinkPad X1 lineup, including the flagship ThinkPad X1 Carbon. Lenovo's 2023 ThinkPad X1 Carbon, X1 Yoga, and X1 Nano will all get new Intel CPU processors and use recycled materials for the first time.

According to Lenovo's announcement, the 14-inch ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11, 13-inch ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8, and 13-inch ThinkPad Nano Gen 3 will each use as much as 97 percent post-consumer content (PCC) plastic in their battery enclosures and 95 percent PPC plastic in the laptops' speaker enclosures, as well as their included AC adapters.

Further, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11 will have a palm rest that's 90 percent recycled magnesium. Meanwhile, the clamshell's bottom cover will be 55 percent recycled aluminum.

Enlarge / It's called the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle, and it was designed by Oshkosh Defense. (credit: USPS)

On Tuesday, the long-running saga of the United States Postal Service's delivery fleet took another turn when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced that the service is increasing the number of electric vehicles it plans to purchase. The new plan calls for a minimum of 60,000 Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDV) by 2028, 45,000 of which will be battery EVs. The USPS will also buy an additional 21,000 commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) EVs—perhaps EVs like the Ford e-Transit or the BrightDrop Zevo 600—for deliveries by 2028. And from 2026, all vehicles bought by the USPS will be BEVs.

"Every neighborhood, every household in America deserves to have electric USPS trucks delivering clean air with their mail, and today’s announcement takes us almost all the way there. The Postal Service’s shift to only purchasing electric mail trucks within five years is the marker of a sea change in the federal fleet as the country looks to an electric future. Ultimately, this shift will buffer us from volatile gas prices, spur the growth of clean energy jobs, and have us all breathing easier," said Adrian Martinez, senior attorney on Earthjustice’s Right to Zero campaign.

The Postal Service's plans to replace its fleet of aging, inefficient, and increasingly dangerous Grumman LLVs crystalized in February 2021, when it announced that it had selected Oshkosh Defense's NGDV as its next mail delivery van. At the time, the USPS said it planned to buy between 50,000-165,000 NGDVs but that only 10 percent of the order would be BEVs.

Enlarge / A Starlink satellite dish in Odesa, Ukraine, in March 2022. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Ukraine will get more than 10,000 more Starlink terminals in the coming months thanks to a new deal with SpaceX and funding from several European countries, Ukraine government official Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview with Bloomberg. Fedorov said that "all financial issues have been resolved," at least until the spring.

SpaceX previously asked the Pentagon to fund the Ukraine government and military's use of Starlink broadband, saying it can't afford to donate more user terminals or pay for operations indefinitely. But CEO Elon Musk backtracked from that stance in October, writing, "The hell with it... even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we'll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free."

Fedorov, Ukraine's vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation, said in the new interview with Bloomberg that "Musk assured us he will continue to support Ukraine. When we had a powerful blackout, I messaged him on that day and he momentarily reacted and has already delivered some steps. He understands the situation."

Enlarge / This is probably the last image taken by InSight on the surface of Mars and relayed back to Earth. (credit: NASA)

NASA's InSight lander has probably phoned home for the last time from the planet Mars.

The space agency said the spacecraft did not respond to communications from Earth on Sunday, December 18. The lack of communications came as the lander's power-generating capacity has been declining in recent months due to the accumulation of Martian dust on its solar panels. NASA said that it is "assumed" that InSight has reached the end of its operations but that it will still continue to try to contact the lander in the coming days.

Also on Monday, the InSight Twitter account shared a photo with a message saying this was probably the last photo it was sending from Mars.