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Neue Forschungsergebnisse, basierend auf Daten von Voyager 2, deuten darauf hin, dass Uranus und Neptun vermutlich Gesteinsriesen sind. (Astronomie, Raumfahrt)

The mysterious impact of a United Airlines aircraft in flight last week has sparked plenty of theories as to its cause, from space debris to high-flying birds.

However the question of what happened to flight 1093, and its severely damaged front window, appears to be answered in the form of a weather balloon.

“I think this was a WindBorne balloon,” Kai Marshland, co-founder of the weather prediction company WindBorne Systems, told Ars in an email on Monday evening. “We learned about UA1093 and the potential that it was related to one of our balloons at 11 pm PT on Sunday and immediately looked into it. At 6 am PT, we sent our preliminary investigation to both NTSB and FAA, and are working with both of them to investigate further.”

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A federal judge has ordered spyware maker NSO to stop using its Pegasus app to target or infect users of WhatsApp.

The ruling, issued Friday by Phyllis J. Hamilton of of the US District Court of the District of Northern California, grants a permanent injunction sought by WhatsApp owner Meta in a case it brought against NSO in 2019. The lawsuit alleged that Meta caught NSO trying to surreptitiously infect about 1,400 mobile phones—many belonging to attorneys, journalists, human-rights activists, political dissidents, diplomats, and senior foreign government officials—with Pegasus. As part of the campaign, NSO created fake WhatsApp accounts and targeted Meta infrastructure. The suit sought monetary awards and an injunction against the practice.

Setting a precedent

Friday’s ruling ordered NSO to permanently cease targeting WhatsApp users, attempting to infect their devices, or intercepted WhatsApp messages, which are end-to-end encrypted using the open source Signal Protocol. Hamilton also ruled that NSO must delete any data it obtained when targeting the WhatsApp users.

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NASA acting administrator Sean Duffy made two television appearances on Monday morning in which he shook up the space agency’s plans to return humans to the Moon.

Speaking on Fox News, where the secretary of transportation frequently appears in his acting role as NASA chief, Duffy said SpaceX has fallen behind in its efforts to develop the Starship vehicle as a lunar lander. Duffy also indirectly acknowledged that NASA’s projected target of a 2027 crewed lunar landing is no longer achievable. Accordingly, he said he intended to expand the competition to develop a lander capable of carrying humans down to the Moon from lunar orbit and back.

“They’re behind schedule, and so the President wants to make sure we beat the Chinese,” Duffy said of SpaceX. “He wants to get there in his term. So I’m in the process of opening that contract up. I think we’ll see companies like Blue [Origin] get involved, and maybe others. We’re going to have a space race in regard to American companies competing to see who can actually lead us back to the Moon first.”

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All the world’s discarded phones, bricked laptops, and other trashed electronics are collectively a treasure trove of rare earth elements (REEs). But separating out and recovering these increasingly sought-after materials is no easy task.

However, a team of researchers says it has developed a way of separating REEs from waste—magnets, in this case—that is relatively easy, uses less energy, and isn’t nearly as emissions and pollution intensive as current methods. The team published a paper describing this method in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In short, this process involves using an electric current to heat waste magnets to very high temperatures very fast, and using chlorine gas to react with the non-REEs in the mix, keeping them in the vapor phase. James Tour, one of the authors and a professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University, says that the research can help the United States meet its growing need for these elements.

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Chances are you’ve encountered some version of the “Ebbinghaus illusion,” in which a central circle appears to be smaller when encircled by larger circles and seems larger when surrounded by smaller circles. It’s an example of context-dependent size perception. But is this unique to humans or are some animals susceptible as well? According to a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, it might depend on the specific sensory environment, since the illusion relies on contextual clues to be effective.

Prior research has produced mixed results on the question of animals and their susceptibility to optical illusions, per the authors. Dolphins, chicks, and redtail splitfins seem to be susceptible, for example, while pigeons, baboons, and gray bamboo snakes are not.

Perhaps the best-known example is cats’ undeniable love of boxes and squares—the “if it fits, I sits” phenomenon documented all over the Internet. This behavior is generally attributed to the fact that cats feel safer when squeezed into small spaces, but it also tells us something about feline visual perception. Both a 1988 study and a 2021 study concluded that cats are susceptible to the Kanizsa square illusion, suggesting that they perceive subjective contours much like humans.

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