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Enlarge / Foxconn chairman Young Liu speaks in Taipei on March 16, 2021. (credit: -Hwa Cheng/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The state of Wisconsin has negotiated a dramatically scaled-back deal with Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn. The move, announced Tuesday by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, is a repudiation of a deal negotiated four years earlier by Evers' Republican predecessor Scott Walker.

The original deal envisioned Foxconn spending as much as $10 billion to manufacture a state-of-the-art factory for manufacturing large liquid-crystal display panels. The deal was announced in 2017, and then-President Donald Trump traveled to Wisconsin for the 2018 groundbreaking, describing the new factory as "the eighth wonder of the world." Foxconn was supposed to get $2.85 billion in state and local incentives under that original deal.

The deal may have been savvy politics for Foxconn in 2017. The company uses factories in other countries to assemble consumer electronics products for Apple and other American companies—products that are often then sent back to the United States for sale. So Trump's protectionist inclinations seemed like a serious threat. Announcing plans to create of thousands of jobs in a key battleground state gave Trump something to boast about, and that may have helped Foxconn curry favor with the new administration.

Enlarge (credit: Moxie Marlinspike/Signal)

For years, Israeli digital forensics firm Cellebrite has helped governments and police around the world break into confiscated mobile phones, mostly by exploiting vulnerabilities that went overlooked by device manufacturers. Now, Moxie Marlinspike—the brainchild behind the Signal messaging app—has turned the tables.

On Wednesday, Marlinspike published a post that reported vulnerabilities in Cellebrite software that allowed him to execute malicious code on the Windows computer used to analyze a device. The researcher and software engineer exploited the vulnerabilities by loading specially formatted files that can be embedded into any app installed on the device.

Virtually no limits

“There are virtually no limits on the code that can be executed,” Marlinspike wrote.

Enlarge / A multi-wavelength image of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant. (credit: Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Supernovae happen. We've witnessed enough of them that we're pretty sure of that. Why they happen has been another issue entirely. As we've worked on understanding the physics that drives these immense explosions, we've occasionally gone through awkward periods when the stars in our models stop exploding. Adding in more realistic physics has generally gotten the models booming again, and right now we're in a period where the latest models appear to be happily self-destructing.

The challenge is trying to find evidence that the physics we're using in our successful models accurately reflects what's going on in a dying star—not an easy task with an event that instantly destroys much of the evidence.

Now, data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory provides a hint that a mechanism used in recent supernova models is probably right. The results are published in this week's issue of Nature.

Enlarge / Photographic reproduction of the Great Isaiah Scroll, the best preserved of the biblical scrolls found at Qumran. It contains the entire Book of Isaiah in Hebrew, apart from some small damaged parts. (credit: Public domain)

Most of the scribes who copied the text contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls were anonymous, as they neglected to sign their work. That has made it challenging for scholars to determine whether a given manuscript should be attributed to a single scribe or more than one, based on unique elements in their writing styles (a study called paleography). Now, a new handwriting analysis of the Great Isaiah Scroll, applying the tools of artificial intelligence, has revealed that the text was likely written by two scribes, mirroring one another's writing style, according to a new paper published in the journal PLOS ONE.

As we've reported previously, these ancient Hebrew texts—roughly 900 full and partial scrolls in all, stored in clay jars—were first discovered scattered in various caves near what was once the settlement of Qumran, just north of the Dead Sea, by Bedouin shepherds in 1946-1947. (Apparently, a shepherd threw a rock while searching for a lost member of his flock and accidentally shattered one of the clay jars, leading to the discovery.) Qumran was destroyed by the Romans, circa 73 CE, and historians believe the scrolls were hidden in the caves by a sect called the Essenes to protect them from being destroyed. The natural limestone and conditions within the caves helped preserve the scrolls for millennia; they date back to between the third century BCE and the first century CE.

Several of the parchments have been carbon dated, and synchrotron radiation—among other techniques—has been used to shed light on the properties of the ink used for the text. Most recently, in 2018, an Israeli scientist named Oren Ableman used an infrared microscope attached to a computer to identify and decipher Dead Sea Scroll fragments stored in a cigar box since the 1950s.

Enlarge / The lure of frozen deliciousness that led to uncovering insane techno craziness. (credit: NurPhoto | Getty Images)

Of all the mysteries and injustices of the McDonald’s ice cream machine, the one that Jeremy O’Sullivan insists you understand first is its secret passcode.

Press the cone icon on the screen of the Taylor C602 digital ice cream machine, he explains, then tap the buttons that show a snowflake and a milkshake to set the digits on the screen to 5, then 2, then 3, then 1. After that precise series of no fewer than 16 button presses, a menu magically unlocks. Only with this cheat code can you access the machine’s vital signs: everything from the viscosity setting for its milk and sugar ingredients to the temperature of the glycol flowing through its heating element to the meanings of its many sphinxlike error messages.

“No one at McDonald’s or Taylor will explain why there’s a secret, undisclosed menu," O’Sullivan wrote in one of the first, cryptic text messages I received from him earlier this year.

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  This is the 2023 Cadillac Lyriq, a new electric SUV. [credit: Cadillac ]

On Wednesday, Cadillac formally revealed the production version of its next SUV. Called the Lyriq, when it goes on sale next year starting at $59,990, it will join the Hummer EV as part of General Motors' third wave of electric vehicles (after Chevrolet's experiments with the EV1 and Bolt EV).

If you think this vehicle looks familiar, you're right—in August 2020, Cadillac presented a show-car version of the Lyriq, and the production version has changed very little. But, at the time, Cadillac wasn't ready to talk technical specs. Now it is.

Propulsion to the rear wheels is provided by one of GM's Ultium Drive motors that will appear in more than 20 new EVs in the coming few years. That electric motor endows the Lyriq with 225 kW (340 hp) and 440 Nm (325 lb-ft), which should mean the 2,545 kg (5,610 lb) SUV will be appropriately quick as opposed to face-meltingly fast.

Enlarge / A stack of 60 Starlink satellites launched in 2019. (credit: SpaceX / Flickr)

SpaceX has accused satellite-broadband rival OneWeb of spreading a false story claiming that the companies' satellites nearly crashed into each other.

In reality, "[t]he probability of collision never exceeded the threshold for a [collision-avoidance] maneuver, and the satellites would not have collided even if no maneuver had been conducted," SpaceX told the Federal Communications Commission in an ex parte filing. The filing describes a meeting that SpaceX and OneWeb representatives had with FCC staff yesterday in which SpaceX said it "corrected the record regarding recent press reports regarding physical coordination between SpaceX and OneWeb."

The meeting came one day after The Wall Street Journal published an article titled "Elon Musk's Satellite Internet Project Is Too Risky, Rivals Say." The Journal article described OneWeb's allegations as follows: