Month: April 2023

Enlarge / Liftoff of the Juice spacecraft on an Ariane 5 rocket. (credit: ESA)

10:00 am ET Friday: After a one-day delay due to lightning, an Ariane 5 rocket successfully lifted off from French Guiana on Friday morning carrying the Juice spacecraft. About 40 minutes after the launch, the European Space Agency successfully took control of the spacecraft after it separated from the rocket's upper stage.

Although a critical one, this is but the first step on a long journey into space for the probe, which will spend the next eight years reaching Jupiter. But with a healthy spacecraft and a good trajectory, this is the best possible start European scientists could have hoped for.

Original post: As soon as Thursday morning, the European Space Agency will launch a large probe to Jupiter to study some of the giant planet's most intriguing moons.

Enlarge (credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring)

Water has made the Earth the planet that it is—a planet known for its blue oceans. Water shapes the land through erosion and is fundamental to Earth's ability to support life. But we have a hard time understanding exactly how Earth ended up with all this water, as the building blocks that created it were likely to be dry, and the collisions that turned these building blocks into a planet should have driven any surface waters off into space.

Various means have been proposed to deliver water to Earth after its formation. But a new study takes information we've gained from examining exoplanets and applies this to Earth. The results suggest that chemical reactions that would have occurred during Earth's formation would have produced enough water to fill the world's oceans. And, as a side benefit, the model explains the somewhat odd density of the Earth's core.

Waterproof

The Earth seems to have primarily been constructed from materials in the inner Solar System. Not only were those materials in the right place, but present material found in asteroids of the region provided good matches in terms of their elemental and isotopic composition. But these materials are also very dry. That's not a surprise; the temperatures in this area would have kept water from condensing out as a solid, as it can further out in the Solar System, beyond a point known as water's "ice line."

Enlarge (credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring)

Water has made the Earth the planet that it is—a planet known for its blue oceans. Water shapes the land through erosion and is fundamental to Earth's ability to support life. But we have a hard time understanding exactly how Earth ended up with all this water, as the building blocks that created it were likely to be dry, and the collisions that turned these building blocks into a planet should have driven any surface waters off into space.

Various means have been proposed to deliver water to Earth after its formation. But a new study takes information we've gained from examining exoplanets and applies this to Earth. The results suggest that chemical reactions that would have occurred during Earth's formation would have produced enough water to fill the world's oceans. And, as a side benefit, the model explains the somewhat odd density of the Earth's core.

Waterproof

The Earth seems to have primarily been constructed from materials in the inner Solar System. Not only were those materials in the right place, but present material found in asteroids of the region provided good matches in terms of their elemental and isotopic composition. But these materials are also very dry. That's not a surprise; the temperatures in this area would have kept water from condensing out as a solid, as it can further out in the Solar System, beyond a point known as water's "ice line."

Enlarge / US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) speaks at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) in Washington, DC, on March 2, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Pacific Press)

A Republican lawmaker who chairs a key House committee subpoenaed Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan today in an attempt to rein in the agency's ongoing investigation into Twitter.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the newly created Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, told Kahn today that his committee's research shows "the FTC harassed Twitter in the wake of Mr. Musk's acquisition" and "abused it [sic] statutory and enforcement authority."

Jordan teamed up with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) last month to demand documents from the FTC about what they called "inappropriate and burdensome demands coinciding with Elon Musk's acquisition of the company." Jordan wasn't happy with Khan's response, so he followed up with today's subpoena.

Enlarge / US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) speaks at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) in Washington, DC, on March 2, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Pacific Press)

A Republican lawmaker who chairs a key House committee subpoenaed Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan today in an attempt to rein in the agency's ongoing investigation into Twitter.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the newly created Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, told Kahn today that his committee's research shows "the FTC harassed Twitter in the wake of Mr. Musk's acquisition" and "abused it [sic] statutory and enforcement authority."

Jordan teamed up with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) last month to demand documents from the FTC about what they called "inappropriate and burdensome demands coinciding with Elon Musk's acquisition of the company." Jordan wasn't happy with Khan's response, so he followed up with today's subpoena.

Enlarge / A type ball from a 1961 IBM Selectric typewriter. (credit: Getty)

There are some feelings you just can't re-create. And to IBM Selectric loyalists, neither beam spring keyboards nor buckling spring designs nor a modern mechanical keyboard can replicate the distinct feel driven by that legendary type ball. In the '60s and '70s, the Selectric was an office staple, but the growth of PCs and daisy wheels forced the machine into retirement by 1986. That hasn't stopped people from buying, restoring, and selling Selectrics, though. The problem is, IBM stopped making the single printing element that makes those typewriters so special. You can find the type balls online, (including options claiming to be used and never used) and at stores carrying old electronic components. But you'd save time and resources if you could make your own. It took years for someone to find a way to make the Selectric golf ball 3D-printable, but now someone claims they have.

A tinkerer named Sam Ettinger recently shared his Selectric type ball 3D-printing project on Hackaday and Github and shared the files on Printables, as reported by Hackaday. But beware: These finalized versions haven't been tested or printed by their creator. Earlier this month, Ettinger shared a video on Mastodon of the prior version in action, admitting that some letters weren't usable.

The new models are reportedly 0.2 mm shorter to address this and adjust the letter rotation, since it was "90 degrees off." Because of this, we can't verify how successful these models would be in real use.

Enlarge / A still from the HBO series The Last of Us. (credit: Warner Bros. Discovery)

As expected, media mega-corp Warner Bros. Discovery has announced a new streaming service that will combine the programming of HBO Max and Discovery+, replacing those services with one single subscription. It will simply be called "Max" (as previously reported), and we learned today that it will launch on May 23 in the US.

HBO and Discovery semi-recently fell under the same umbrella after a merger, but they've run two streaming services, each with a different style of content. HBO Max combined the prestige dramas of premium cable network HBO with a deep library of Warner Bros-owned properties and some generally strong originals under the HBO Max-produced brand. Discovery+, meanwhile, offered mostly unscripted series from networks like HGTV, Discovery Channel, TLC, and Food Network.

The new streaming service will put all that under the same roof, with three subscription tiers:

An elephant's prehensile trunk is a marvel of biology, featuring as many as 60,000 muscles that enable the animal to not just breathe, eat, and drink water, but also to communicate and pinch or grasp objects, among other abilities. Some elephants have been known to make rudimentary tools with their trunks to scratch themselves, repel insects, or even block roads. And one Asian elephant, named Pang Pha, in the Berlin Zoo learned how to peel a banana, according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology—a highly unusual ability for a pachyderm, and one the other Asian elephants in the Berlin Zoo don't possess.

“We discovered a very unique behavior,” said co-author Michael Brecht of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience. “What makes Pang Pha's banana peeling so unique is a combination of factors—skillfulness, speed, individuality, and the putatively human origin—rather than a single behavioral element.”

Brecht and his co-authors first heard about Pang Pha's unusual ability from her zoo caretakers and decided to conduct a series of experiments, presenting the elephant with about 10 bananas each round and filming her behavior. The first experiments involved Pang Pha alone, and while she repeatedly raised her trunk—typical begging behavior for elephants—when approached with bananas, for the first few weeks, the elephant didn't peel any of them. Eventually the scientists realized that whether or not Pang Phase peeled a banana depended on its ripeness. She preferred to devour green or yellow bananas whole and rejected brown bananas entirely.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

An Amsterdam court today ordered one of the largest adult entertainment websites, xHamster, to remove all amateur footage showing recognizable people in the Netherlands who did not consent to be featured on the site.

The ruling followed complaints raised by the Expertise Bureau for Online Child Abuse, known as EOKM, which identified 10 videos where xHamster could not verify it had secured permission from amateur performers to post. The court found that this violated European privacy laws and conflicted with a prior judgment from the Amsterdam court requiring porn sites to receive permission from all performers recognizably featured before posting amateur videos.

“It is a victory for the rights and privacy of victims whose nude images were published without demonstrable consent,” EOKM said in a press release provided to Ars.