Month: September 2024

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

Elon Musk's X temporarily became accessible again in Brazil despite government orders requiring Internet service providers to block the social network. X's revival was enabled by the company switching to a different network provider, namely Cloudflare, but Cloudflare reportedly made changes that allow ISPs to resume their blocking of X.

"When X was shut down in Brazil, our infrastructure to provide service to Latin America was no longer accessible to our team," X's Global Government Affairs account said last night. "To continue providing optimal service to our users, we changed network providers. This change resulted in an inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users. While we expect the platform to be inaccessible again shortly, we continue efforts to work with the Brazilian government to return very soon for the people of Brazil."

X's statement that restoration of service in Brazil was "inadvertent" surprised Abrint, a trade group for Brazilian ISPs. The BBC quoted Abrint official Basílio Rodriguez Pérez as saying, "everything that happened during the day led us to believe that it was on purpose."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Most living organisms easily surpass machines when it comes to navigating real-world environments and adaptability to changing conditions. One way to bridge that gap is building biohybrid robots that merge synthetic machinery with biological components like animal muscles, bacteria, or plants.

But living muscles are very hard to keep alive in a machine, bacteria have a very short lifespan, and plants tend to react to things a bit slowly, like Ents in The Lord of the Rings. So, a team of scientists at Cornell University went down a different path and built biohybrid robots controlled by fungi, specifically, oyster mushrooms.

Understanding mushrooms’ signals

Robots controlled by fungi, despite giving strong Last of Us vibes, are a good idea on paper. Fungi are very easy to sustain and can live pretty much everywhere, including extreme environments like the Arctic, or even amid nuclear contamination. They're also cheap to culture in large quantities and excel at reacting to environmental cues like exposure to light.

Enlarge / Instead of giving the ID.4 complicated door handles that recess into the side of the car, VW has designed these to be flush yet always accessible. (credit: Volkswagen)

Volkswagen has a bit of a headache on its hands with the ID.4 crossover. There's a problem with the electric vehicle's flush-set door handles, which VW says don't meet its waterproofing specs. Consequently, moisture can get into the door controller's circuit board, possibly allowing the door to open while the EV is in motion.

As a result, VW has issued a recall for almost 100,000 ID.4s, as well as suspending production of the popular crossover at its factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and issuing a stop-sale to VW dealers. The stop-sale applies to preowned ID.4s as well as vehicles on lots yet to find their first owner.

The recall applies to all US ID.4s—99,064 in total, from the initial model-year 2021 cars built in Germany to the latest 2024 models made in the USA. VW first started hearing complaints in February 2024. By June, together with its suppliers, it had determined the problem was due to inadequate protection against water entering and then corroding the door handle electronics.

(credit: USGS)

Droughts in the coming decades could be longer than projected by current climate models, a new study published Wednesday in Nature warns.

The international team of scientists examined potential biases that could skew climate models used to make drought projections under Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change midrange and high emissions scenarios. The researchers corrected for the bias by calibrating those models with observations of the longest annual dry spells between 1998 and 2018.

By the end of this century, they found that the average longest periods of drought could be 10 days longer than previously projected. Trouble spots included North America, Southern Africa, and Madagascar, where the newly calibrated models showed that the increase in the longest annual dry spell could be about twice what the older models predicted.