Month: December 2022

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

If you were too distracted by the best trailers of The Game Awards to notice the start of this year's Ars Technica Charity Drive sweepstakes, don't worry. You still have time to donate to a good cause and get a chance to win your share of over $2,000 worth of swag (no purchase necessary to win).

So far this year, after roughly five days, over 100 readers have donated over $6,500 to either the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Child's Play as part of the charity drive (Child's Play is leading in the donation totals by just over $100, for what it's worth). That's a bit slower than last year's starting pace and a long way off from 2020's record annual haul of over $58,000, but there's still plenty of time until the Charity Drive wraps up on January 3, 2023.

That doesn't mean you should put your donation off, though. Do yourself and the charities involved a favor and give now while you're thinking about it. Don't forget and end up kicking yourself in January for not participating.

Enlarge / Where the action happens inside the National Ignition Facility. (credit: Damien Jemison/LLNL)

On Tuesday, the US Department of Energy (DOE) confirmed information that had leaked out earlier this week: its National Ignition Facility had reached a new milestone, releasing significantly more fusion energy than was supplied by the lasers that triggered the fusion. "Monday, December 5, 2022 was an important day in science," said Jill Hruby, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration. "Reaching ignition in a controlled fusion experiment is an achievement that has come after more than 60 years of global research, development, engineering, and experimentation."

In terms of specifics, the lasers of the National Ignition Facility deposited 2.05 megajoules into their target in that experiment. Measurements of the energy released afterward indicate that the resulting fusion reactions set loose 3.15 megajoules, a factor of roughly 1.5. That's the highest output-to-input ratio yet achieved in a fusion experiment.

Before we get to visions of fusion power plants dotting the landscape, however, there's the uncomfortable fact that producing the 2 megajoules of laser power that started the fusion reaction took about 300 megajoules of grid power, so the overall process is nowhere near the break-even point. So, while this was a real sign of progress in getting this form of fusion to work, we're still left with major questions about whether laser-driven fusion can be optimized enough to be useful. At least one DOE employee suggested that separating it from its nuclear-testing-focused roots may be needed to do so.

Enlarge / Sam Bankman-Fried testifies during a House Financial Services Committee hearing on December 8, 2021. (credit: Getty Images | Tom Williams)

FTX co-founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas yesterday and will face charges from the US Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and one other US government agency. Damian Williams, the Justice Department's US Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), announced that "Bahamian authorities arrested Samuel Bankman-Fried at the request of the US Government, based on a sealed indictment filed by the SDNY."

The SEC announced today that it charged Bankman-Fried "with orchestrating a scheme to defraud equity investors in FTX Trading" and that investigations into "other securities law violations and into other entities and persons relating to the alleged misconduct are ongoing." The SEC said Bankman-Fried is also facing charges from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a US agency that regulates derivatives markets.

The criminal indictment, unsealed today, was issued by a grand jury on Friday in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Bankman-Fried was charged with eight crimes: conspiracy to commit wire fraud on customers, wire fraud on customers, conspiracy to commit wire fraud on lenders, wire fraud on lenders, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to defraud the United States and violate campaign finance laws.

Enlarge / A woman watches white flags on the National Mall on September 18, 2021, in Washington, DC. Over 660,000 white flags were installed here to honor Americans who have lost their lives to COVID-19. (credit: Getty | Chen Mengtong)

Without COVID-19 vaccines, the US would have seen four times more deaths from the pandemic virus—an additional 3 million lives lost—as well as nearly four times more hospitalizations, 1.5 times more infections, and an additional $1.5 trillion in medical bills since December of 2020.

Those are the top-line results from a new modeling study by the Commonwealth Fund, which simulated the unmitigated effects of COVID-19 in the US from December 2020 to November 2022.

The age-stratified model accounted for US demographics, the prevalence of disease-enhancing comorbidities, social networks, limited social contact during pandemic restrictions, COVID-19 case data, hospitalization rates, vaccination administration eligibility and rates, vaccine efficacy estimates, waning protection from vaccination and infection, and the characteristics of five SARS-CoV-2 variants (Iota, Alpha, Gamma, Delta, Omicron). The model was calibrated to replicate real-world data of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths before the researchers removed vaccines from the scenario.