Month: September 2024

Enlarge (credit: Marc Piasecki / Contributor | Getty Images Entertainment)

Elon Musk's X has won its appeal on free speech grounds to block AB 587, a California law requiring social media companies to submit annual reports publicly explaining their controversial content moderation decisions.

In his opinion, Ninth Circuit court of appeals judge Milan Smith reversed a district court's ruling that he said improperly rejected Musk's First Amendment argument. Smith was seemingly baffled to find that the "district court performed, essentially, no analysis on this question."

According to Smith, the district court "offered no reason" for finding that AB 587 only compelled commercial speech "except for wanting" to follow "the lead of the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits,” which never dealt with "speech similar" to AB 587's required content moderation reports. Instead, Smith said, the district court seemed to take up California's invitation to invent a new category of commercial speech that did not clash with the First Amendment.

Enlarge / BMW has had some hydrogen fuel cell-powered iX5s in testing for a while, and for Art Basel 2024 this one got a new look courtesy of Es Devlin. (credit: Enes Kucevic/BMW)

Today, BMW announced that it will start selling vehicles with hydrogen fuel cell powertrains in 2028 alongside the battery electric, gasoline-, and diesel-powered cars and SUVs it sells today. It is working with Toyota to develop new fuel cells, targeting half the cost and 20 percent better efficiency than current-generation fuel cell stacks. But the technology should be seen as complementary to battery electric vehicles, not a replacement for them, BMW said.

Earlier this morning, the automaker held a roundtable discussion with Michael Rath, BMW's vice president for hydrogen vehicles, who began by answering the main question I had been planning to ask well before any of the assembled journalists were called on.

"It's a fact: battery electric vehicles are more efficient in well-to-wheel than fuel cell electric vehicles. It's absolutely true that the conversion of electricity into hydrogen and back into electricity in the car generates losses and hence is less efficient than using the electricity directly," Rath said.

Enlarge / High pressure ices near the crust are a feature of water-rich worlds.` (credit: Benoit Gougeon (University of Montreal))

The possibility that there is liquid water on an exoplanet’s surface usually flags it as “potentially habitable,” but the reality is that too much water might prevent life from taking hold.

“On Earth, the ocean is in contact with some rock. If we have too much water, it creates high-pressure ice underneath the ocean, which separates it from the planet’s rocky interior,” said Caroline Dorn, a geophysicist at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, who led new research in exoplanet interiors.

This high-pressure ice prevents minerals and chemical compounds from being exchanged between the rocks and the water. In theory, that should make the ocean barren and lifeless. But Dorn’s team argues that even exoplanets that have enough water to form such high-pressure ice can host life if the majority of the water is not stored in the surface oceans but is held much deeper in the planet’s core. The water in the core can’t sustain life—it’s not even in its molecular form there. But it means that a substantial fraction of a planet’s water isn’t on the surface, which makes the surface oceans a little more shallow and prevents high-pressure ice from forming at their bottom.