Month: February 2023

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

On Wednesday morning, Twitter CEO Elon Musk locked his Twitter account, telling users, “Made my account private until tomorrow morning to test whether you see my private tweets more than my public ones.”

Since then, Twitter users have poked fun at Musk for seemingly not knowing how the platform works—or at least not having Twitter engineers available who can explain it to him. One account with nearly 70,000 followers joked that Musk needed to run “a middle schooler's idea of an experiment to figure out how the company's algorithm works because he fired anyone who could have possibly explained it to him.” Back in November, Musk had to start recruiting engineers after mass layoffs and Twitter's changing workplace benefits led many engineers to exit Twitter, seemingly threatening to destabilize the platform and trigger malfunctions.

Musk will apparently be spending the rest of today testing out this experiment, seemingly in response to conservative users like LibsofTikTok and Ben Shapiro, who reported running their own tests to prove that locked accounts generate more views than public accounts.

Enlarge / The Venturi Antarctica has been operating down south since late 2021. (credit: Venturi)

The Antarctic's only electric exploration vehicle has received an upgrade for 2023. Called the Venturi Antarctica, it's a bright-orange tracked vehicle that has been in service at Belgium's Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Station since December 2021, allowing researchers there to travel around East Antarctica without belching hydrocarbon pollutants all over the place.

It's 11.4-feet (3.4 m) long, 6.6-feet (2 m) wide, and 7.2-feet (2.2 m) tall, and it weighs 5,500 lbs (2.5 metric tons). The Antarctica's tracks are powered by a pair of 80 hp (60 kW) electric motors, which are fed by a 52.6 kWh battery pack that gives the vehicle a range of 31 miles (50 km) in temperatures as low as -58˚F (-50˚C). For longer trips, it can fit a second pack to extend that range. So far, the Antarctica has about 310 miles (500 km) under its tracks.

Ars got its first glimpse of the Antarctica in 2016 during our visit to Venturi's Monegasque HQ. (credit: Elle Cayabyab Gitlin)

The pod-like cabin also has room for equipment—it would be a pretty useless research vehicle if it didn't—and it can carry up to six humans as well. Charging takes 2–18 hours, depending on the conditions, and the electricity comes from Princess Elisabeth Station's wind and solar capacity.

Enlarge / LauncherOne arrives on the runway at Long Beach Airport for a fit check with Cosmic Girl in October 2018. (credit: Virgin Orbit/Greg Robinson)

This week, Virgin Orbit formally notified investors that it has raised an additional $10 million from Virgin Investments Limited, an investment firm owned by Sir Richard Branson.

Exactly what this filing means for the company's future will probably not become clear until Virgin Orbit releases financial details about its fourth-quarter earnings for 2022, and this may not happen until late March. But there are a few things in the filing that raise concerns about the financial solvency of the US-based small-launch company.

Virgin Orbit was founded in 2017 by Branson as a small satellite launch company. At that time, it was separated from Virgin Galactic, which is a suborbital space tourism company that aims to fly paying customers on short forays above 80 km. Virgin Orbit drops its LauncherOne rocket from a modified Boeing 747-400 named Cosmic Girl.

Enlarge (credit: iStock/Getty Images)

For the past century, the public and private sector appear to have agreed on one thing: the more parking, the better.

As a result, cities were built up in ways that devoted valuable space to storing cars, did little to accommodate people who don’t own cars and forced developers to build expensive parking structures that increased the cost of living.

Two assumptions undergird urban parking policy: Without convenient parking, car owners would be reluctant to patronize businesses; and absent a dedicated parking spot for their vehicle, they’d be less likely to rent and buy homes. Because parcels of urban land are usually small and pricey, developers will build multistory garages. And so today, a glut of these bulky concrete boxes clutter America’s densely populated cities.