Month: January 2023

Enlarge / Blue Origin's concept art for a New Glenn rocket launch ascending to orbit. (credit: Blue Origin)

On Wednesday, the Washington-based space company Blue Origin posted a job opening for a position titled "Blue Ring Senior Program Manager." However, the posting to the company's Workday "Careers" page was taken down less than 24 hours later—perhaps because it contained details about an advanced program the company does not yet want to discuss publicly.

Asked about the short-lived post, a Blue Origin spokesperson told Ars on Friday that, "We’re updating the job requisition for this position."

For now, the job posting remains live on LinkedIn. Although the requisition is now listed as "no longer accepting applications," details about the job remain online. Intriguingly, the job posting states, "As the Program Manager, you will lead the development, manufacturing, and operations of a multi-mission, multi-orbit platform."

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  One of the spontaneously broken Pixel 7 cameras. [credit: blazers_n_bowties ]

The Pixel 7's biggest design change over last year was in the camera bar, which switched from a single big sheet of glass covering every camera to a solid aluminum block with smaller glass cutouts over each camera lens. The thought at the time was that less glass would lead to fewer light streaks in the camera and maybe even slightly better durability thanks to a smaller glass area. Ironically this smaller glass seems to be more prone to breaking. Tons of reports have started to pop up on Reddit, the Google support forums, and Twitter claiming the camera glass just shattered one day. Besides the hundreds of responses on Reddit and the support forums, hitting up #pixel7brokencamera on Twitter will give you an endless stream of gruesome pictures.

We've seen this exact problem several times before in the world of smartphones. Samsung was hit with this issue in 2016 on the Galaxy S7 and again in 2021 the Galaxy S20, both of which kicked off class-action lawsuits. In the Samsung and Google cases, the shattered glass doesn't look like it shattered from impact, which typically shows an impact point and outward spiderwebbing. In these cases, a large, round hole appears in the glass—it looks like the phone was shot with a bullet.

These specialized smartphone glass panels increase scratch resistance by building stress into the glass. We don't know the manufacturer of Google's camera glass, but a Corning engineer explains the general process in this Scientific American article, saying, "There's a layer of compressive stress, then a layer of central tension, where the glass wants to press out, then another layer of compressive stress." If you mess something up in your glass formula and these layers aren't in a perfect balance, one day the glass will just go "pop" and you'll get these outward mini explosions.

Enlarge / People kayaking and riding boats along a canal in The Hague, Netherlands. (credit: Getty | Yuriko Nakao)

It was his yellow, bloody eyes that gave his illness away. The previously healthy 18-year-old showed up at an emergency department in the Netherlands after two days of fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. His heart was beating rapidly and his abdomen was a bit tender.

The whites of his eyes were splotched with blood, a sign that blood vessels on the surface of his eyes had burst. Areas that weren't bloodied were a jaundice yellow. Lab tests would later indicate he had acute kidney injury as well as liver dysfunction. But an equally important clue as to what was causing his acute illness was the mention that three weeks prior he had fallen into a canal.

In all, it was a textbook case, according to a report published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine. The man had a rare but severe bout of leptospirosis, which is a bacterial infection marked by fever, jaundice, kidney failure, and hemorrhage. The source: a fall into a canal that was likely tainted with the urine of infected rodents.

Enlarge / Microsoft's arguments against the FTC's halting of its Activision Blizzard purchase now rely more on Call of Duty than constitutional authority and corporate civil rights. (credit: Michael Ciaglo/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Microsoft has amended its response to the Federal Trade Commission's suit trying to halt a $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard, no longer claiming the FTC is unconstitutional by nature and denying the company its 5th Amendment rights.

David Cuddy, public affairs spokesperson for Microsoft, told Axios' Stephen Totilo that the company "put all potential arguments on the table internally and should have dropped these defenses before we filed. The FTC has an important mission to protect competition and consumers, and we quickly updated our response to omit language suggesting otherwise based on the Constitution," Cuddy told Axios.

Microsoft's original Federal Trade Commission response (PDF) stated that proceedings against Microsoft were invalid "because the structure of the Commission as an independent agency that wields significant executive power, and the associated constraints on removal of the Commissioners and other Commission officials, violates Article II of the US Constitution and the separation of powers." Another point claimed that the use of an Administrative Law Judge, rather than a typical judge with a lifetime appointment, was a violation of Article III.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

The beginning of the new year means the start of a new electric vehicle tax incentive in the US. Until now, the IRS allowed taxpayers to claim a tax credit of up to $7,500 on a new plug-in vehicle, with the exact amount determined by the battery's capacity in kWh. Additionally, the credit was designed to sunset once a manufacturer sold its 200,000th plug-in, although only Tesla and General Motors ever reached that milestone.

But the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 rewrote the plug-in vehicle tax incentives, and the new rules went into effect at the beginning of January. Now, the tax credit is for "clean vehicles" rather than plug-ins, and it covers fuel cell EVs, some plug-in hybrid EVs, and all battery EVs.

It's a more complex beast now, however. The maximum tax credit is still $7,500, but to qualify, a vehicle must have a battery capacity of at least 7 kWh and a gross vehicle weight rating of less than 14,000 lbs, and it must have undergone final assembly in North America. There are price caps—vans, SUVs, and pickup trucks can't cost more than $80,000, and other vehicles must stay under $55,000 to qualify. There are income caps, too: $300,000 for married couples filing jointly, $225,000 for heads of households, and $150,000 for other tax filers.

Enlarge (credit: Peter Zelei Images)

On July 19, 2022, the UK experienced a taste of the weather to come. Temperatures reached 40.3° Celsius—soaring past the previous record by more than one-and-a-half degrees.

Dozens of homes in east London were destroyed by fires, while elsewhere in the country, the heat pushed the power grid close to the point of failure. The Office for National Statistics estimates that there were more than 2,800 excess deaths among over-65s during the summer heat waves of 2022, making it the deadliest year for heat since 2003.

Before the temperatures had even peaked, Friederike Otto was in her office in Imperial College London, getting ready to answer the question that she knew would be thrown at her countless times in the following week: Was climate change to blame?

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Whistleblowers have alleged that the Saudi Arabian government infiltrated the highest ranks of Wikipedia in order to control information about the country, activists reported yesterday. The alleged infiltration resulted in the 2020 arrests in Saudi Arabia of two Wikipedia administrators—Ziyad al-Sofiani (jailed for up to eight years) and Osama Khalid (jailed for up to 32 years)—for "swaying public opinion" and "violating public morals” by posting content “deemed to be critical about the persecution of political activists in the country.” Today, Wikimedia Foundation released a statement to Ars disputing the report, alleging that there was no “infiltration” and that Wikipedia admins have “no ranks.”

These conflicting statements follow an investigation concluded by the Wikimedia Foundation last month that resulted in the banning of 16 users for “conflict of interest editing on Wikipedia projects” in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. At the time, Wikimedia said, “We were able to confirm that a number of users with close connections with external parties were editing the platform in a coordinated fashion to advance the aim of those parties.”

According to a joint statement from US-based rights group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) and Beirut-based SMEX, sources close to Wikipedia and interviews with the jailed administrators confirmed that those “external parties” were “government agents acting as independent editors.” These government agents acted as spies for Saudi authorities, the activists alleged, identifying noncompliant administrators like those jailed for editing Wikipedia entries to include information that Saudi officials did not approve of.