Month: May 2018

Enlarge (credit: Chris Kleponis/Pool via Bloomberg)

US President Donald Trump wants to escalate his trade war to include a total ban on German luxury cars, says a report in WirtschaftsWoche. According to the German publication, which says its report results from talking to several unnamed US and European diplomats, during French President Macron's recent visit to Washington, Trump told him that he would "maintain his trade policy until no Mercedes models rolled on Fifth Avenue in New York."

This news follows news last week that Trump had already asked Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to launch an investigation into the national security threat posed by imported cars, trucks, and auto parts; Trump is also considering adding 25 percent tariffs on imported vehicles. WirtschaftsWoche's article points out that just prior to his inauguration in 2017, Trump railed against the Mercedes-Benz vehicles he saw in New York.

When you walk down Fifth Avenue, everyone has a Mercedes-Benz in front of their house." But that's not reciprocity. "How many Chevrolets do you see in Germany? Not too many, maybe none at all. You do not see anything over there; it's a one-way street," said the real estate billionaire. Although he is for free trade, but not at any price: "I love free trade, but it must be a smart trade, so I call it fair.

The US market is extremely important for luxury German automakers, and a ban on importing new vehicles would be devastating for brands like Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz. But even if Trump gets his wish, an import ban is highly unlikely to have the effect he's looking for. Both BMW and Mercedes-Benz maintain large manufacturing presences here in the US, in part because any vehicles they build and sell here are exempt from existing import tariffs.

Enlarge (credit: Carl Court / Getty Images)

Russia officially banned the secure message app Telegram in April, and now it appears the app is facing problems in other regions. According to a message posted on Telegram by the company's CEO Pavel Durov, Apple has been "preventing" Telegram iOS app updates since April.

The version of the app currently in the App Store is two months old, and Durov claims features such as stickers will not work properly in iOS 11.4 (which was pushed out earlier this week) due to the lack of updates.

Apple stopped approving Telegram for iOS updates globally 1,5 months ago after Russia ordered a block on Telegram. More here – https://t.co/yarcIrV2Bh

— Pavel Durov (@durov) May 31, 2018

This comes after Roskomnadzor, Russia's Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, ordered a block of the messaging app in the country in April. Russia's Federal Security Service wanted access to Telegram's users' encrypted messages, saying it was necessary to monitor potential terrorists. Even after a Russian court ruled that the app should be blocked in Russian territories, Telegram refused to hand over encryption keys that would give Russian officials access to user data.

Enlarge (credit: Carl Court / Getty Images)

Russia officially banned the secure message app Telegram in April, and now it appears the app is facing problems in other regions. According to a message posted on Telegram by the company's CEO Pavel Durov, Apple has been "preventing" Telegram iOS app updates since April.

The version of the app currently in the App Store is two months old, and Durov claims features such as stickers will not work properly in iOS 11.4 (which was pushed out earlier this week) due to the lack of updates.

Apple stopped approving Telegram for iOS updates globally 1,5 months ago after Russia ordered a block on Telegram. More here – https://t.co/yarcIrV2Bh

— Pavel Durov (@durov) May 31, 2018

This comes after Roskomnadzor, Russia's Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, ordered a block of the messaging app in the country in April. Russia's Federal Security Service wanted access to Telegram's users' encrypted messages, saying it was necessary to monitor potential terrorists. Even after a Russian court ruled that the app should be blocked in Russian territories, Telegram refused to hand over encryption keys that would give Russian officials access to user data.

Enlarge (credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Mutchler (STScI))

The Universe, according to cosmologists, is divided into three unequal portions. In the big bargain bin near the exit aisle you’ll find dark energy. Dark energy’s job is to push everything apart. There’s lots of it, and no one knows why. Then, next to to dark energy, on a display shelf, you’ll find a smaller amount of dark matter. Regular matter, the stuff you and I can see, is tucked off to the side: small and barely noticeable.

But the Universe isn't a store's display, and these individual parts can interact. Many of our models for dark matter predict a hierarchy of structures—halos of dark matter in and around galactic clusters and individual galaxies that hold them together. At large scales, we can detect these halos through gravitational lensing. Because there are observations to constrain them, all current theories of dark matter predict large halos correctly.

However, these same theories also predict smaller halos with sizes between 1,000 and a billion solar masses. In this mass range, we have no observations, and consequently, current theories disagree. These tiny halos are going to be hard to spot though: their gravitational effect—the only way we can see them—will be minimal. But, now a group of researchers may have figured out a new way to spot some of them.