Month: September 2024

Enlarge / Oil painting by Belgian marine artist François Etienne Musin depicting tje HMS Erebus trapped in Arctic ice. (credit: Public domain)

Scientists at the University of Waterloo have identified one of the doomed crew members of Captain Sir John S. Franklin's 1846 Arctic expedition to cross the Northwest Passage. According to a recent paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, DNA analysis revealed that a tooth recovered from a mandible at one of the relevant archaeological sites was that of Captain James Fitzjames of the HMS Erebus. His remains show clear signs of cannibalism, confirming early Inuit reports of desperate crew members resorting to eating their dead.

"Concrete evidence of James Fitzjames as the first identified victim of cannibalism lifts the veil of anonymity that for 170 years spared the families of individual members of the 1845 Franklin expedition from the horrific reality of what might have befallen the body of their ancestor," the authors wrote in their paper. "But it also shows that neither rank nor status was the governing principle in the final desperate days of the expedition as they strove to save themselves."

As previously reported, Franklin's two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, became icebound in the Victoria Strait, and all 129 crew members ultimately died. It's been an enduring mystery that has captured imaginations ever since. Novelist Dan Simmons immortalized the expedition in his 2007 horror novel, The Terror, which was later adapted into an anthology TV series for AMC in 2018.

Enlarge / The empty chair of Steward Health Care System Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Ralph de la Torre who did not show up during the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions Examining the Bankruptcy of Steward Health Care: How Management Decisions Have Impacted Patient Care. (credit: Getty | )

The infamous CEO of a failed hospital system is suing an entire Senate committee after being held in contempt of Congress, with civil and criminal charges unanimously approved by the full Senate last week.

In a federal lawsuit filed Monday, Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre claimed the senators "bulldozed over [his] constitutional rights" as they tried to "pillory and crucify him as a loathsome criminal" in a "televised circus."

The Senate committee—the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), led by Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—issued a rare subpoena to de la Torre in July, compelling him to testify before the lawmakers. They sought to question the CEO on the deterioration of his hospital system, which previously included more than 30 hospitals across eight states. Steward filed for bankruptcy in May.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

A married couple can't sue Uber over severe injuries they suffered in a 2022 car accident because of a mandatory arbitration provision in the ride-sharing company's terms of use, according to a ruling issued by the New Jersey Superior Court appellate division.

In November 2023, a lower court denied Uber's motion to compel arbitration and dismiss the complaint filed by plaintiffs Georgia and John McGinty. But the lower-court ruling was reversed on September 20 in a unanimous decision by three appellate court judges.

Georgia McGinty had agreed to Uber's arbitration clause long before the accident. But the couple challenged the terms in part because they say their minor daughter, then 12, was the one who clicked the most recent terms agreement when the girl ordered food through Uber Eats. Those newer terms were also allegedly less specific about users waiving the right to a jury trial.

Enlarge (credit: Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Following site-wide user protests last year that featured moderators turning thousands of subreddits private or not-safe-for-work (NSFW), Reddit announced that mods now need its permission to make those changes.

Reddit's VP of community, going by Go_JasonWaterfalls, made the announcement about what Reddit calls Community Types today. Reddit's permission is also required to make subreddits restricted or to go from NSFW to safe-for-work (SFW). Reddit's employee claimed that requests will be responded to “in under 24 hours.”

Reddit’s employee said that “temporarily going restricted is exempt” from this requirement, adding that “mods can continue to instantly restrict posts and/or comments for up to 7 days using Temporary Events.” Additionally, if a subreddit has fewer than 5,000 members or is less than 30 days old, the request “will be automatically approved,” per Go_JasonWaterfalls.

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Public records systems that courts and governments rely on to manage voter registrations and legal filings have been riddled with vulnerabilities that made it possible for attackers to falsify registration databases and add, delete, or modify official documents.

Over the past year, software developer turned security researcher Jason Parker has found and reported dozens of critical vulnerabilities in no fewer than 19 commercial platforms used by hundreds of courts, government agencies, and police departments across the country. Most of the vulnerabilities were critical.

One flaw he uncovered in the voter registration cancellation portal for the state of Georgia, for instance, allowed anyone visiting it to cancel the registration of any voter in that state when the visitor knew the name, birthdate, and county of residence of the voter. In another case, document management systems used in local courthouses across the country contained multiple flaws that allowed unauthorized people to access sensitive filings such as psychiatric evaluations that were under seal. And in one case, unauthorized people could assign themselves privileges that are supposed to be available only to clerks of the court and, from there, create, delete, or modify filings.

Enlarge / I've had a soft spot for Audi's RS7 for at least a decade now. Will Audi replace it, or is this the last in its line? (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

The arrival of competent electric vehicles is a boon for car enthusiasts as much as those who consider driving a chore and their vehicle a driving appliance. Electric motors can respond faster than the revviest naturally aspirated engines this side of a mid-2000s Formula 1 engine, and with more immediate torque than the mightiest of turbochargers. They are the way forward, for performance as well as energy efficiency. Such is apparent after spending some time behind the wheel of a $128,000 Audi RS7 Performance after a diet of mostly EV performance cars.

For a long time, the RS7 was the Audi to go for if you wanted something with more than two doors, because the R8 doesn't work with your lifestyle. Based on the more humble A7 fastback sedan, it was worked over by Audi Sport, the four rings' racing offshoot based up the road from Ingolstadt in Neckarsulm, Germany. The designers there gave it a restyle, with aggressively flared arches to envelope larger wheels and tires, and new aerodynamic features to keep the car planted at speed. The result is one of the brand's handsomest creations, at least to this observer.

Under the hood, a twin-turbo 4.0L V8 is now even more potent than when we first drove the RS7 in 2019, with 621 hp (463 kW) and 627 lb-ft (850 Nm) at your right foot's beck and call, sent to all four wheels via an eight-speed ZF 8 HP transmission and, at the rear axle, a torque-vectoring rear differential.

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PlayStation 5 owners are reporting advertisements on the device’s home screen. Frustratingly, the ads seem to be rather difficult to disable, and some are also outdated ads and/or confusing content.

The ads, visible on users' home screens when they hover over a game title, can only be removed if you disconnect from the Internet, IGN reported today. However, that would block a lot of the console’s functionality. The PS5 dashboard previously had ads but not on the home screen.

Before this recent development, people would see game art if they hovered over a game icon on the PS5’s home screen. Now, doing so reportedly brings up dated advertisements. For example, IGN reported seeing an ad for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse “coming soon exclusively in cinemas” when hovering over the Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales game. Webheads will of course recall that the Spider-Verse movie came out in June 2023.

Enlarge / A Downdetector map showing where Verizon outages are reported. (credit: Downdetector)

Wireless customers of Verizon and AT&T have found that they cannot make calls, send or receive text messages, or download any mobile data. As of this article's publication, it appears the problem has yet to be resolved.

Users took to social media throughout the morning to complain that their phones were showing "SOS" mode, which allows emergency calls but nothing else. This is what phones sometimes offer when the user has no SIM registered on the device. Resetting the device and other common solutions do not resolve the issue. For much of the morning, Verizon offered no response to the reports.

Within hours, more than 100,000 users reported problems on the website Downdetector. The problem does not appear isolated to any particular part of the country; users in California reported problems, and so did users on the East Coast and in Chicago, among other places.

Enlarge / The Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant is set to shut down for good today. (credit: Ashley Cooper)

On Monday, the UK will see the closure of its last operational coal power plant, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, which has been operating since 1968. The closure of the plant, which had a capacity of 2,000 megawatts, will bring an end to the history of the country's coal use, which started with the opening of the first coal-fired power station in 1882. Coal played a central part in the UK's power system in the interim, in some years providing over 90 percent of its total electricity.

But a number of factors combined to place coal in a long-term decline: the growth of natural gas-powered plants and renewables, pollution controls, carbon pricing, and a government goal to hit net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

From boom to bust

It's difficult to overstate the importance of coal to the UK grid. It was providing over 90 percent of the UK's electricity as recently as 1956. The total amount of power generated continued to climb well after that, reaching a peak of 212 terawatt hours of production by 1980. And the construction of new coal plants was under consideration as recently as the late 2000s. According to the organization Carbon Brief's excellent timeline of coal use in the UK, continuing the use of coal with carbon capture was given consideration.