Month: July 2023

Enlarge / A pregnant woman holds her belly on September 27, 2016. (credit: Getty | Matthew Horwood)

The number of people in the US dying of pregnancy-related causes more than doubled over two decades, with Black, Native American, and Alaska Native people facing the highest risks, according to a new study in JAMA.

The US has the highest rate of maternal deaths compared to other high-income countries, despite spending far more on health care—both on a per-person and share of gross domestic product basis. And, while US maternal deaths have long been high, they've only gotten higher while other high-income countries have seen declines.

Still, digging into US maternal mortality data to understand the trend is difficult. States define maternal deaths differently, some have been slow to add a standard pregnancy-related question on death certificates, and some delay the release of their data.

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  The Galaxy Z Fold 5. It doesn't look much different from last year. [credit: WinFuture ]

The foldables market is really heating up in 2023, especially in the US, with Google and OnePlus joining the fray. Now Samsung is facing worldwide big-screen foldable competition for the first time (though all these use Samsung displays, so Samsung wins regardless), and its competitors this year will be the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 5. If you've been wondering what these will look like, wonder no longer because WinFuture's Roland Quandt has official images of these devices from nearly every angle, and there are even pictures of the Galaxy Tab S9 tablet.

The big device, the Galaxy Z Fold 5, looks nigh-indistinguishable from the Fold 4. The LED flash has moved from the bottom of the camera array to the side. That's about it. That's just on the outside, though. On the inside, there is supposedly a whole new hinge system with Samsung's rumored  "teardrop" hinge design, which is similar to what most other foldable manufacturers have done. A teardrop hinge usually has movable support plates to the left and right of the hinge that can swing out of the way when closing. This allows the flexible display to rest in a teardrop shape instead of being crushed into a hard crease. It also allows the device to fold flat instead of leaving a wedge-shaped gap that Samsung phones have previously used. An earlier SmartPrix report had the Fold 5 dimensions at 13.4 mm when folded, with the Fold 4 ranging from 14.2 mm to 15.8 mm due to the wedge-shaped folding design.

For the smaller flip-phone foldable, the Galaxy Z Flip 5, Samsung beats Motorola's new Razr with a bigger front screen. Samsung's official black wallpaper on a black bezel doesn't illuminate this well, but an early render from OnLeaks better communicates what's happening with the display. It apparently doesn't encroach on the two camera lenses, like the Razr, but instead keeps a good distance away from them. It's still not a rectangle, though, thanks to the display dipping down a bit in the area next to the camera lenses. Presumably, you could show some kind of status bar display down there or maybe some buttons. The OnLeaks report had the outer display at 3.4 inches, a big upgrade from the 1.9-inch display on the Flip 4.

In 1674, a priest named Francisco de Burgoa published his account of visiting the ruins of the Zapotec city of Mitla in what is now Oaxaca in southern Mexico. He described a vast underground temple with four interconnected chambers, the last of which featured a stone door leading into a deep cavern. The Zapotec believed this to be the entrance to the underworld known as Lyobaa ("place of rest"). Burgoa claimed that Spanish missionaries who explored the ruins sealed all entrances to the temple, and local lore has long held that the entrance lies under the main altar of a Catholic church built over the ruins.

An international team of archaeologists recently announced that they found evidence for this fabled underground labyrinth under the ruins—right where the legends said it should be—after conducting scans of the site using ground penetrating radar (GPR), electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), and seismic noise tomography (SNT).  The team also found evidence of an earlier construction stage of a palace located in another part of the site.

Mitla is one of the most significant archaeological sites in Oaxaca Valley. It was an important religious center, serving as a sacred burial site—hence its name, which derives from Mictlan ("place of the dead" or "underworld"). The unique structures at Mitla feature impressively intricate mosaics and geometric designs on all the tombs, panels, friezes, and walls, made with small polished stone pieces fitted together without using mortar.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Hundreds of Internet-exposed devices inside solar farms remain unpatched against a critical and actively exploited vulnerability that makes it easy for remote attackers to disrupt operations or gain a foothold inside the facilities.

The devices, sold by Osaka, Japan-based Contec under the brand name SolarView, help people inside solar facilities monitor the amount of power they generate, store, and distribute. Contec says that roughly 30,000 power stations have introduced the devices, which come in various packages based on the size of the operation and the type of equipment it uses.

Searches on Shodan indicate that more than 600 of them are reachable on the open Internet. As problematic as that configuration is, researchers from security firm VulnCheck said Wednesday, more than two-thirds of them have yet to install an update that patches CVE-2022-29303, the tracking designation for a vulnerability with a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10. The flaw stems from the failure to neutralize potentially malicious elements included in user-supplied input, leading to remote attacks that execute malicious commands.

Enlarge / One of Harbinger's trucks on a demo ride at ACT Expo in May. (credit: Harbinger)

We make no secret of our affection for the electric vehicle here at Ars, and that extends beyond the light-duty cars and trucks we usually drive and write about. The commercial vehicle sector is electrifying, too, but most of what we've seen in terms of commercial EVs have been either at the lightest end of the scale—class 2 trucks like the Ford E-Transit and BrightDrop Zevo 600—or the biggest class 8 trucks like we've seen from Daimler, Volvo, and Tesla.

But what about a middle ground? One of the first companies to address the missing commercial EVs between the two ends of the spectrum is Harbinger, which has developed its own platform for class 4-8 EVs. It recently debuted a new medium-duty electric truck platform designed for last-mile delivery. Harbinger designed the powertrain in-house with durability in mind.

"When we look at the biggest product in our segment—for delivery vehicles anyways—it's the Ford F-59, which is a stripped chassis, and that's basically an engine with like minimal additional stuff," Harbinger CEO John Harris told Ars. "It's the same engine that Ford will put into an F-250. The engine has the durability, it can be mounted and handled properly, and there's not much else there. But if we look at an EV, it's much different. Its battery packs more than the drivetrain. And Ford doesn't have a medium-duty toolbox for electrification."

Enlarge / Annapurna IV, at left here, might have once been half a kilometer taller. (credit: Richard I'Anson)

The Earth's mountains are engaged in a constant balancing act. Tectonic forces—a combination of volcanism and plate collisions—push them skyward. But erosion pulls them down. The height of the tallest peaks is set by which of these forces dominate.

When it comes to erosion, ice can be a dominant factor. Glaciers scrape away rock, while freeze/thaw cycles crack it. But a new paper suggests that ice has a limited effect on the very tallest peaks. At those altitudes, the freeze/thaw cycle shuts down because things remain cold year-round. And most peaks are steep enough that glaciers never have the chance to form. (They're mostly a kilometer or more below the peaks, down in the valleys).

Instead, the new paper argues that the tallest mountains don't so much erode as collapse, producing utterly massive landslides that can be catastrophic many miles downslope. To make this case, the paper presents evidence from a landslide involving 20 cubic kilometers of material in the Annapurna region of Nepal.