Month: March 2023

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu Agency / Contributor | Anadolu)

It looks like the Twitter experience is about to change for nearly everybody on the platform—even those who buy into CEO Elon Musk’s Twitter Blue subscription service.

On Monday, Musk tweeted that after April 15, “only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations” and eligible to vote in polls (which can be a way for accounts to boost engagement). Musk claims this is “the only realistic way to address” an otherwise “hopeless losing battle” with “advanced AI bot swarms taking over” the platform.

These changes will apparently take effect two weeks after Musk said Twitter will begin “un-verifying” legacy blue checked accounts. That makes it likely that soon some of Twitter’s most beloved and trusted accounts will no longer be promoted widely to users via the “For You” tab if they refuse to pay $8 a month to get access to subscriber benefits.

Enlarge / How far is too far to go for the perfect shot of espresso? Here's at least one trail marker for you. (credit: Norm Sohl)

Making espresso at home involves a conundrum familiar to many activities: It can be great, cheap, or easy to figure out, but you can only pick, at most, two of those. You can spend an infinite amount of time and money tweaking and upgrading your gear, chasing shots that taste like the best café offerings, always wondering what else you could modify.

Or you could do what Norm Sohl did and build a highly configurable machine out of open source hardware plans and the thermal guts of an Espresso Gaggia. Here's what Sohl did, and some further responses from the retired programmer and technical writer, now that his project has circulated in both open hardware and espresso-head circles.

Like many home espresso enthusiasts, Sohl had seen that his preferred machine, the Gaggia Classic Pro, could be modified in several ways, including adding a proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controller and other modifications to better control temperature, pressure, and shot volumes. Most intriguing to Sohl was Gaggiuino, a project that adds those things with the help of an Arduino Nano or STM32 Blackpill, a good deal of electrical work, and open software.

Enlarge / Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao at the Web Summit 2022 conference in Lisbon, Portugal. (credit: Getty Images | Ben McShane )

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) yesterday sued Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, saying the company and its founder, Changpeng Zhao, are charged with "willful evasion of federal law and operating an illegal digital asset derivatives exchange."

Binance committed "numerous violations of the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC regulations," the agency said. In a press release announcing the civil enforcement action, the agency said its litigation "seeks disgorgement, civil monetary penalties, permanent trading and registration bans, and a permanent injunction against further violations of the CEA and CFTC regulations."

The CFTC alleges that the defendants operated the trading platform "through an intentionally opaque common enterprise, with Zhao at the helm as Binance's owner and chief executive officer." The agency said the defendants "chose to knowingly disregard applicable provisions of the CEA while engaging in a calculated strategy of regulatory arbitrage to their commercial benefit." Samuel Lim, Binance's former chief compliance officer, was charged with aiding and abetting the violations.

Enlarge / Certain squid have the ability to camouflage themselves by making themselves transparent and/or changing their coloration. (credit: YouTube/KQED Deep Look)

Certain cephalopods like cuttlefish, octopuses, and squid have the ability to camouflage themselves by making themselves transparent and/or changing their coloration. Scientists would like to learn more about the precise mechanisms underlying this unique ability, but it's not possible to culture squid skin cells in the lab. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have discovered a viable solution: replicating the properties of squid skin cells in mammalian (human) cells in the lab. They presented their research at a meeting of the American Chemical Society being held this week in Indianapolis.

"In general, there's two ways you can achieve transparency," UC Irvine's Alon Gorodetsky, who has been fascinated by squid camouflage for the last decade or so, said during a media briefing at the ACS meeting. "One way is by reducing how much light is absorbed—pigment-based coloration, typically. Another way is by changing how light is scattered, typically by modifying differences in the refractive index." The latter is the focus of his lab's research.

Squid skin is translucent and features an outer layer of pigment cells called chromatophores that control light absorption. Each chromatophore is attached to muscle fibers that line the skin's surface, and those fibers, in turn, are connected to a nerve fiber. It's a simple matter to stimulate those nerves with electrical pulses, causing the muscles to contract. And because the muscles pull in different directions, the cell expands, along with the pigmented areas, which changes the color. When the cell shrinks, so do the pigmented areas.

Enlarge / How did one of the rarest 911s end up becoming a Transformer? (credit: Stef Schrader)

"I didn't know what car Mirage was going to be at first," said Steven Caple Jr., director of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. "Where I'm from, in Cleveland, Ohio, I'd never even been in a Porsche before," he continued. "My actual first introduction to Porsche was Bad Boys I, so shout out to Michael Bay—that's all I really had."

Caple admitted in a panel during Austin's South by Southwest festival that the star car of the beloved action film Bad Boys inspired him to make Mirage a classic Porsche in the upcoming film. Mirage is a bit of a rebel himself, and the callback to the classic buddy-cop movie just felt right.

Fortunately, extraterrestrial Autobots won't be tempted to pull over in any sketchy places to debate the merits of in-car snacking, but this does mean they have bigger nemeses that necessitate transforming into giant robots to handle. It can be more complicated than you'd expect to make a cool Porsche into an Autobot film star, though—in fact, Porsche has a whole team that helps Hollywood studios get just the right car on the silver screen. Here's how it all comes together.

Enlarge / The CHIME telescope has proven adept at picking up fast radio bursts. (credit: Andre Renard / CHIME Collaboration)

By combing through a collection of data, researchers may have discovered evidence that we've already observed the first "blitzar," a bizarre astronomical event caused by the sudden collapse of an overly massive neutron star. The event is driven by an earlier merger of two neutron stars; this creates an unstable intermediate neutron star, which is kept from collapsing immediately by its rapid spin. In a blitzar, the strong magnetic fields of the neutron star slow down its spin, causing it to collapse into a black hole several hours after the merger.

That collapse suddenly deletes the dynamo powering the magnetic fields, releasing their energy in the form of a fast radio burst. The researchers who performed the analysis suggest that this phenomenon could explain the non-repeating forms of these events.

Too big to live

How big can a neutron star get before it collapses into a black hole? We don't have a good answer, in part because we're not sure what happens to the bizarre forms of matter inside one of these massive objects. We don't even know if the neutrons that give the star its name survive or fall apart into their component quarks. It's one of those annoying questions where the answer includes the phrase "it depends."