Month: June 2023

Enlarge (credit: NASA)

When Tonga’s underwater Hunga Tonga volcano lost its temper in an eruption on January 15, 2022, it belched gobs of magma and exhaled clouds of ash and water vapor out of the ocean, triggering intense lightning. This was no ordinary thunderstorm.

Hunga is infamous for its tantrums, but it has outdone itself. That storm now boasts the most lightning ever recorded on Earth. Hanging ominously above the Pacific Ocean was a volcanic cloud lit by concentric rings of lightning that flashed about 192,000 times over the 11 hours that the volcano was active (that’s some 2,615 flashes a minute). Lightning shot up to 30 km (19 miles) high—another record, beating even cyclones and supercells.

Led by volcanologist Alexa Van Eaton of the US Geological Survey, a team of researchers who took a closer look at the observations from the Hunga eruption and ensuing storm found that no one has ever recorded lightning so extreme. “Our findings show that a sufficiently powerful volcanic plume can create its own weather system, sustaining the conditions for electrical activity at heights and rates not previously observed,” Van Eaton and her team said in a study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

The inexorable rise of the North American Charging Standard continues unabated. On Tuesday, it was Volvo's turn to be the latest automaker to negotiate access to Tesla's Supercharger network for its customers beginning in 2024. But perhaps more importantly, SAE International will make NACS an official standard within the next six months. And that's probably just what the rest of the auto industry needs to make the jump.

Is this a flood yet?

NACS is Tesla's latest-spec charging protocol, which it opened up to other automakers in November 2022. At first, the sole taker was Aptera, but since that company still has not started selling cars, it remained a little theoretical.

It started looking a lot more real at the end of May. That's when Ford said that from 2024, its EVs will be able to use the nearly 12,000 Tesla Superchargers in North America.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The dramatic fallout continues in the mass exploitation of a critical vulnerability in a widely used file-transfer program, with at least three new victims coming to light in the past few days. They include the New York City Department of Education and energy companies Schneider Electric and Siemens Electric.

To date, the hacking spree appears to have breached 122 organizations and obtained the data of roughly 15 million people, based on posts the crime group has published or victim disclosures, Brett Callow, a threat analyst at the antivirus company Emsisoft, said in an interview.

Microsoft has tied the attacks to Clop, a Russian-speaking ransomware syndicate. The hacks are all the result of Clop exploiting what had been a zero-day vulnerability in MOVEit, a file-transfer service that’s available in both cloud and on-premises offerings.

Enlarge / The Geminids put on quite a show each year. (credit: NASA.gov)

Each year, skywatchers get to gaze at the spectacle of the Geminids streaking through the night sky from mid-November through late December. However, this meteor shower is highly unusual, and not only because it is one of the easiest to view.

Meteor showers usually originate from comets that fly close to the Sun. Comets are made of frozen gasses, dust, and rock, and the Sun’s heat vaporizes some of that gas and releases it into space, dislodging debris that eventually falls to Earth. But the Geminids are exceptional because they originate from an asteroid instead of a comet. Asteroid 3200 Phaeton is the source of this trail of debris, but asteroids are not affected by solar heat the same way as comets, so it’s unclear why Phaeton has left a trail of debris.

NASA scientists who analyzed data from the space agency’s Parker Solar Probe have now finally found the most likely answer to the mystery of how the Geminids formed: a catastrophic event. “The Geminids may have formed via a more violent, catastrophic destruction of bodies that transited very near to the Sun,” the scientists said in a study recently published in The Planetary Science Journal.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting report on a new "YouTube Playables" feature that it says is currently in testing. Google recently killed off one YouTube-adjacent gaming service, Stadia, but that was AAA games streamed frame by frame over the Internet. "Playables" would take more of a Facebook approach, offering more casual, simple games that run in a browser. Think Farmville or Angry Birds, but on YouTube.

One example game from the report is Stack Bounce, a brick-breaking game that has a smartphone app but can also run in a browser. I know the Flash platform has been dead for years, but in my mind, these are still "Flash games"—simple, 2D, addictive games on a browser.

Why exactly would anyone want casual games on YouTube? It says YouTube "is already a popular destination for gamers and competes with Amazon’s Twitch for viewers of livestreamed footage. By hosting a selection of online games, the product would give YouTube a larger footprint in the sector." Do people play Flash-style games on Twitch? If you look at a "time watched" game tracker for Twitch, what you get are almost exclusively the AAA games that Google opted out of when it shut down Stadia. Aside from gambling games, everything in the top 50 is a AAA title.

Enlarge / Mycobacterium tuberculosis. (credit: Getty | NIH/NIAID)

A woman in Tacoma, Washington, with an infamous case of tuberculosis is now out of jail—with strings attached.

Law enforcement agents took the woman—identified only as "V.N." in court documents—into custody on June 1. At that point, V.N. had spent a year and half ignoring monthly court orders to have her tuberculosis case treated and/or isolate at home to keep from spreading her infection to others in the community. She also spent about three months on the lam, actively evading law enforcement as they tried to execute a March 2, 2023, civil arrest warrant. During that time, she was seen taking a city bus to a local casino and seemingly hid from law enforcement after that.

She was eventually apprehended at her home without incident on June 1, Pierce County Sheriff’s spokesperson Sgt. Darren Moss told Ars at the time. Deputies booked her into a negative pressure room in the Pierce County Jail, where she would get her court-ordered tuberculosis treatment without risk to others in the facility.

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Ongoing protests regarding Reddit's upcoming API price change on July 1 are rattling the Reddit community, but they're not the only ones impacted. Those who navigate Google's ad-littered, search-engine-optimized (SEO) results by adding "Reddit" to their query have seen their experience hampered, too. According to CNBC, Google's aware that its search results need fine-tuning through appendages like "site:reddit.com." However, Google's response to this problem fails to address the core reasons people modify their search queries like this: There's demand for results delivering human (not necessarily influencer) voices and that aren't listed due to people manipulating Google's algorithm.

People rely on the Reddit hack for Google search results to avoid things that often float to the top of results pages—websites built on SEO but lack reliable or relevant content. But since the Reddit blackout started June 12 and was followed by other forms of user protest, that trick is less effective. As of this writing, over 2,400 subreddits are still private in protest, according to the Reddark_247 counter on Twitch, while others are read-only, suddenly labeled as not safe for work (NSFW), or dedicated to images of John Oliver.

On Monday, CNBC, citing an audio recording of a company-wide meeting from earlier this month, reported that Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google SVP who heads Google Search, "admitted users are unhappy when employees asked about the Reddit blackouts and their impact on results."

Enlarge / Satellite controllers in Dubai monitor the launch of a Soyuz rocket from Russia on Tuesday. (credit: Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre)

For the first time since the invasion of Ukraine essentially cut off Russia’s space industry from foreign customers, a Russian rocket lifted off Tuesday and carried satellites into orbit with commercial technology from Western companies.

The payloads from companies based in the United Kingdom and Luxembourg flew on a satellite owned by the United Arab Emirates, which has maintained warmer relations with Russia than Western countries. Although the payloads are small, their presence on Tuesday’s launch is notable after the war in Ukraine, and resulting Western sanctions, effectively led to an embargo against putting US and European space technology on Russian rockets.

UK and European Union sanctions introduced after Russia’s 2022 invasion prevent exporting a wide range of space technology to Russia. Companies from the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and other nations have moved their satellites off of Russian rockets, primarily switching them to launch vehicles from SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and India.