Ars Technica
A big European satellite will make an uncontrolled return to Earth Wednesday
Enlarge / An illustration of the ERS-2 satellite in space. (credit: European Space Agency)
Nearly three decades ago, the European Space Agency launched its largest and most sophisticated Earth observation satellite to date, the European Remote Sensing 2 satellite, on an Ariane 4 rocket. The spacecraft functioned well for more than 15 years before the space agency decided it was reaching the end of its operational lifetime.
Over the course of a number of maneuvers, operators lowered the satellite's altitude from 785 km (488 miles) to 573 km (356 miles) during the year 2011, allowing it to eventually be dragged into Earth's atmosphere for disposal. As part of this process, the satellite's propellant tanks were drained. This was to minimize the risk of a catastrophic explosion that could have generated a large amount of space debris, the agency said.
Now, more than a dozen years later, the European Remote Sensing 2 satellite is due to re-enter Earth's atmosphere this week. The problem is that the satellite will make an uncontrolled reentry, so European operators don't know where it will land. The trade-off for draining propellant more than a decade ago is that there is no fuel to ensure the satellite falls into a remote patch of ocean.
That time the Morgan Motor Company designed a modern coupe, the Aeromax
Enlarge / No, it's not the Batmobile—it's the Morgan Aeromax. (credit: Morgan)
The Morgan Motor Company has been making new cars that look like old cars since its inception over 100 years ago (of course, its cars looked modern when the company started, but you get my gist). The company has always looked to give buyers a blast of old-school British sporting eccentricity, a different kind of proposition than you'll find with cars that come with engines that sit behind the driver.
Way back in the noughties, though, the company took a crack at doing something modern with the Aero 8. The initial car was interesting to look at, but it came with a V8 and made fun noises. Its distinctive look wasn't a surprise, as current Head of Design Jon Wells succinctly summed up for me. "There wasn't a designer [at Morgan]," he said. When Henry Morgan started making three-wheel runabouts in the 1900s, he wasn't a designer, just "an industrious fellow." From there, the company was a family business that built cars that all looked the same. Once the vehicles were in the standard shape, all the engineers needed to do was make sure new versions were up to standard.
Twenty-first-century customers—even ones looking for a Morgan—expect more in the way of ergonomics and practicality, and that has led the company to hire actual designers who are able to whip up a vision of past, present, and future at the drop of a hat. But there wasn't a single one until a guy named Matthew Humphries sent the company a letter in 2004. Humphries was a student at Coventry University's world-renowned automotive design course at the time, and, much like any designer, he wanted to make his mark on the world.
SpaceX wants to take over a Florida launch pad from rival ULA
Enlarge / SpaceX's fully-stacked Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster on a launch pad in South Texas. (credit: SpaceX)
One of the largest launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station will become vacant later this year after the final flight of United Launch Alliance's Delta IV Heavy rocket. SpaceX is looking to make the sprawling facility a new home for the Starship launch vehicle.
The environmental review for SpaceX's proposal to take over Space Launch Complex 37 (SLC-37) at Cape Canaveral is getting underway now, with three in-person public meetings and one virtual meeting scheduled for March to collect comments from local residents, according to a new website describing the plan.
Then federal agencies, led by the Department of the Air Force, will develop an environmental impact statement to evaluate how Starship launch and landing operations will affect the land, air, and water around SLC-37, which sits on Space Force property on the Atlantic coastline.
Flowers grown floating on polluted waterways can help clean up nutrient runoff
Enlarge / The cut flowers could pay for themselves and even turn a profit. (credit: Margi Rentis)
Flowers grown on inexpensive floating platforms can help clean polluted waterways, over 12 weeks extracting 52 percent more phosphorus and 36 percent more nitrogen than the natural nitrogen cycle removes from untreated water, according to our new research. In addition to filtering water, the cut flowers can generate income via the multibillion-dollar floral market.
In our trials of various flowers, giant marigolds stood out as the most successful, producing long, marketable stems and large blooms. Their yield matched typical flower farm production.
Why it mattersWater pollution is caused in large part by runoff from farms, urban lawns, and even septic tanks. When it rains, excess phosphorus, nitrogen, and other chemicals wash into lakes and rivers.
New FDA-approved drug makes severe food allergies less life-threatening
Enlarge / Peanuts (credit: Getty | CFOTO/Future Publishing)
Living with food allergies can be a fraught existence. There is no cure, and the standard management is to be ever vigilant of everything you eat and have an emergency shot of epinephrine constantly handy in case an accidental ingestion leads to a swift, life-threatening reaction. But, for the millions of people in the US who live with such allergies, a new drug may dull the threat.
On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration approved the antibody drug omalizumab (brand name Xolair) as an injection to lessen allergic reactions to foods in people ages 1 and up. In a trial of 168 children and adults with multiple food allergies, participants who received shots of omalizumab for 16 to 20 weeks were much more likely to tolerate a test dose of allergy-inducing foods at the end than those who received a placebo.
Omalizumab—which was previously approved to treat asthma, hives, and nasal polyps—works by binding to a class of antibodies in the body called immunoglobulin E (IgE) that are specifically involved in allergic responses. The monoclonal antibody drug binds IgE, blocking it from binding to its target receptor, thus preventing it from triggering the immune responses that lead to allergy symptoms.
Elon Musk’s X allows China-based propaganda banned on other platforms
Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)
Lax content moderation on X (aka Twitter) has disrupted coordinated efforts between social media companies and law enforcement to tamp down on "propaganda accounts controlled by foreign entities aiming to influence US politics," The Washington Post reported.
Now propaganda is "flourishing" on X, The Post said, while other social media companies are stuck in endless cycles, watching some of the propaganda that they block proliferate on X, then inevitably spread back to their platforms.
Meta, Google, and then-Twitter began coordinating takedown efforts with law enforcement and disinformation researchers after Russian-backed influence campaigns manipulated their platforms in hopes of swaying the 2016 US presidential election.
Microsoft fixes problem that let Edge replicate Chrome tabs without permission
Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)
Microsoft has fixed a problem that resulted in tabs from Google Chrome being imported to Microsoft Edge without user consent, as spotted by The Verge. Microsoft has kept mum on the situation, making the issued update the first time Microsoft has identified this as a problem, rather than typical behavior for the world’s third-most-popular browser.
In late January, The Verge Senior Editor Tom Warren reported experiencing the puzzling Edge issue. After updating his computer, Edge launched with the tabs that Warren most recently used in Chrome. He eventually realized that Edge has a feature you can toggle, reading: “Always have access to your recent browsing data each time you browse on Microsoft Edge.” The setting is reachable in Edge by typing “edge://settings/profiles/importBrowsingData.” Interestingly, it allows Edge to import browsing data from Chrome every time you open Edge, but data from Firefox can only be imported manually. However, Edge was seizing Chrome tabs without this setting enabled. Others reported having this problem via Microsoft's support forum and social media, as well.
The Edge setting as seen on a Windows 11 23H2 system running Edge 122. You can have data continuously imported from Chrome or on demand from Firefox, but other browsers don't appear. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Microsoft didn’t respond to The Verge’s initial request for comment, but this week it released an Edge update that seems to address matters. Microsoft's release notes from February 15 say:
Wyze outage leaves customers without camera coverage overnight
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Wyze cameras have been unreliable for many users for more than nine hours today, with cameras disappearing from the Wyze app or simply reporting errors when owners try to view them.
Users started reporting issues on Down Detector just before 4 am Eastern time, and the company issued a service advisory at 9:30 am. As of 1 pm, the company stated that its "metrics show that devices are starting to recover," and later that there was "continued improvement," but it was still investigating history viewing issues. At 1:15 pm, an Ars writer was able to view his Wyze v3 camera feed and update its firmware.
A Wyze employee updated the service advisory at 2:28 p.m. Eastern to note "continued improvement for device connection recovery." They added that the Event tab in the Wyze app, where one can see prior recordings activated by motion or other detections, is disabled, "to investigate a possible security issue," and it will be back soon.
Android 15 Developer Preview 1 is out for the Pixel 6 and up
Enlarge / The Android 15 logo. This is "Android V," if you can't tell from the logo. (credit: Google)
It's that time of year again. Android is going to start its ~8-month-long beta process with the release of a new major OS version. The Android 15 Developer Preview is out today for the Pixel 6, 7, and 8, Pixel Fold, and Pixel Tablet. This release should mark the end of major OS support for the Pixel 5 and 5a series.
So what's new? It's hard to know too much with only the simple text descriptions we're getting, but we have a few bullet points. "Partial screen sharing" will let users share or record individual app windows instead of the entire screen. Phones don't have much of a difference between an app window and a full screen, but it would be nice if this blocked incoming notifications from showing up on your screen share. It would also be nice for tablets.
Android is surfacing an API that supports the Linux kernel's fs-verity feature. This will let you store a read-only file on a read-write file system and cryptographically sign it to ensure it hasn't been maliciously tampered with. Google apparently wants app developers to use this, saying, "This leads to enhanced security, protecting against potential malware or unauthorized file modifications that could compromise your app's functionality or data."
Apple disables iPhone web apps in EU, says it’s too hard to comply with rules
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )
Apple is removing the ability to install home screen web apps from iPhones and iPads in Europe when iOS 17.4 comes out, saying it's too hard to keep offering the feature under the European Union's new Digital Markets Act (DMA). Apple is required to comply with the law by March 6.
Apple said the change is necessitated by a requirement to let developers "use alternative browser engines—other than WebKit—for dedicated browser apps and apps providing in-app browsing experiences in the EU." Apple explained its stance in a developer Q&A under the heading, "Why don't users in the EU have access to Home Screen web apps?" It says:
Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps. And so, to comply with the DMA's requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU.
It will still be possible to add website bookmarks to iPhone and iPad home screens, but those bookmarks would take the user to the web browser instead of a separate web app. The change was recently rolled out to beta versions of iOS 17.4.
Microsoft sure seems to be thinking about some sort of portable Xbox
Enlarge / A demo of "Project Xcloud" streaming running on a mobile device, circa 2019.
Yesterday's news that four unnamed Microsoft games are coming to "the other consoles" was a bit anticlimactic after weeks of now-refuted rumors about games like Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle going to the PlayStation 5. Yet even as those rumors die, Microsoft seems to be actively feeding new rumors regarding plans for some sort of portable gaming device.
In an interview with the Verge accompanying yesterday's "multi-platform" business announcement, Microsoft CEO Phil Spencer was asked directly about any handheld hardware plans, including his recent penchant for liking some social media posts discussing handheld game consoles. While Spencer said he had "nothing to announce," he talked up a lot of other handheld gaming hardware when talking about how Xbox could capture more "player hours."
So, okay, what keeps people from playing certain hours? Well there’s some sleep, school, and kind of normal life, but some of it is just access. Do I have access to the games that I want to play right now? Obviously we’re kind of learning from what Nintendo has done over the years with Switch, they’ve been fantastic with that. So when I look at Steam Deck and the ROG and my Legion Go, I’m a big fan of that space.
Spencer went on to say that "real work" still needs to be done to get Windows to work better with controller input and on smaller 7- to 8-inch screens. That's the kind of OS work we'd note would be very useful if Microsoft is planning to release a Windows-based gaming portable of its own (we're assuming Microsoft would not want to ditch Windows in favor of SteamOS). "That’s a real design point that our platform team is working with Windows to make sure that the experience is even better," he said.
Car dealers step up opposition to White House fuel efficiency targets
Enlarge (credit: Richard Newstead/Getty Images)
Electric vehicle sales had a pretty good 2023 in North America, with more than 1.1 million battery EVs and just under 300,000 plug-in hybrid EVs finding new homes. That's a 50 percent increase on 2022, yet the last few months have seen the trade and business presses report a string of negative stories about EV adoption. And it's not just news stories—major automakers are scaling back their EV ambitions, and together with auto dealerships, they're lobbying the White House to water down its plan to reduce transportation-related carbon emissions.
While US car buyers are still choosing EVs in greater numbers, the rate of increase is beginning to slow. According to a report from S&P Global, EV registrations grew by 23 percent in December, faster than the general increase in new light vehicle sales (15 percent year over year). But market leaders did not do so well. Tesla only grew sales by 11 percent; at Ford, they rose by 13 percent. Chevrolet saw EV sales drop by 26 percent as it finally exhausted its supply of the low-cost Bolt EV.
Car buyers’ concernsSimilarly, a survey from Deloitte provides a little more pessimism when it comes to EV adoption. It has found that only 6 percent of buyers are now considering a battery EV, down from 7 percent in 2023. Demand for plug-in hybrids has also fallen, from 7 percent in 2023 to 5 percent in 2024. Instead, more buyers want gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicles, a full two-thirds in 2024 compared to 58 percent last year.
OpenAI collapses media reality with Sora, a photorealistic AI video generator
Enlarge / Snapshots from three videos generated using OpenAI's Sora.
On Thursday, OpenAI announced Sora, a text-to-video AI model that can generate 60-second-long photorealistic HD video from written descriptions. While it's only a research preview that we have not tested, it reportedly creates synthetic video (but not audio yet) at a fidelity and consistency greater than any text-to-video model available at the moment. It's also freaking people out.
"It was nice knowing you all. Please tell your grandchildren about my videos and the lengths we went to to actually record them," wrote Wall Street Journal tech reporter Joanna Stern on X.
"This could be the 'holy shit' moment of AI," wrote Tom Warren of The Verge.
Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot
Enlarge (credit: Alvin Man | iStock Editorial / Getty Images Plus)
After months of resisting, Air Canada was forced to give a partial refund to a grieving passenger who was misled by an airline chatbot inaccurately explaining the airline's bereavement travel policy.
On the day Jake Moffatt's grandmother died, Moffat immediately visited Air Canada's website to book a flight from Vancouver to Toronto. Unsure of how Air Canada's bereavement rates worked, Moffatt asked Air Canada's chatbot to explain.
The chatbot provided inaccurate information, encouraging Moffatt to book a flight immediately and then request a refund within 90 days. In reality, Air Canada's policy explicitly stated that the airline will not provide refunds for bereavement travel after the flight is booked. Moffatt dutifully attempted to follow the chatbot's advice and request a refund but was shocked that the request was rejected.
DOJ quietly removed Russian malware from routers in US homes and businesses
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
More than 1,000 Ubiquiti routers in homes and small businesses were infected with malware used by Russian-backed agents to coordinate them into a botnet for crime and spy operations, according to the Justice Department.
That malware, which worked as a botnet for the Russian hacking group Fancy Bear, was removed in January 2024 under a secret court order as part of "Operation Dying Ember," according to the FBI's director. It affected routers running Ubiquiti's EdgeOS, but only those that had not changed their default administrative password. Access to the routers allowed the hacking group to "conceal and otherwise enable a variety of crimes," the DOJ claims, including spearphishing and credential harvesting in the US and abroad.
Unlike previous attacks by Fancy Bear—that the DOJ ties to GRU Military Unit 26165, which is also known as APT 28, Sofacy Group, and Sednit, among other monikers—the Ubiquiti intrusion relied on a known malware, Moobot. Once infected by "Non-GRU cybercriminals," GRU agents installed "bespoke scripts and files" to connect and repurpose the devices, according to the DOJ.
Skyrocketing ocean temperatures have scientists scratching their heads
Enlarge (credit: jay_zynism via Getty)
For nearly a year now, a bizarre heating event has been unfolding across the world’s oceans. In March 2023, global sea surface temperatures started shattering record daily highs and have stayed that way since.
You can see 2023 in the orange line below, the other gray lines being previous years. That solid black line is where we are so far in 2024—way, way above even 2023. While we’re nowhere near the Atlantic hurricane season yet—that runs from June 1 through the autumn—keep in mind that cyclones feed on warm ocean water, which could well stay anomalously hot in the coming months. Regardless, these surface temperature anomalies could be triggering major ecological problems already.
“In the tropical eastern Atlantic, it’s four months ahead of pace—it’s looking like it’s already June out there,” says Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami. “It’s really getting to be strange that we’re just seeing the records break by this much, and for this long.”
Rocket Report: Falcon 9 flies for 300th time; an intriguing launch from Russia
Enlarge / The upper stage for the first Ariane 6 flight vehicle is seen inside its factory in Bremen, Germany. The upper stage's hydrogen-fueled Vinci engine is visible in this image. (credit: ESA – M. Pédoussaut)
Welcome to Edition 6.31 of the Rocket Report! Photographers at Cape Canaveral, Florida, noticed a change to the spaceport's skyline this week. Blue Origin has erected a full-size simulator of its New Glenn rocket vertical on its launch pad for a series of fit checks and tests. Late last year, we reported Blue Origin was serious about getting the oft-delayed New Glenn rocket off the ground by the end of 2024. This is a good sign of progress toward that goal, but there's a long, long way to go. It was fun to watch preparations for the inaugural flights of a few other heavy-lift rockets in the last couple of years (Starship, SLS, and Vulcan). This year, it's New Glenn.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Russia launches a classified satellite. On February 9, Russia launched its first orbital mission of the year with the liftoff of a Soyuz-2-1v rocket from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the far north of the country. The two-stage rocket delivered a classified satellite into orbit for the Russian military, Anatoly Zak of RussianSpaceWeb.com reports. In keeping with the Russian military's naming convention, the satellite is known simply as Kosmos 2575, and there's little indication about what it will do in space, except for one key fact.
Doing DNS and DHCP for your LAN the old way—the way that works
Enlarge / All shall tremble before your fully functional forward and reverse lookups! (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
Here's a short summary of the next 7,000-ish words for folks who hate the thing recipe sites do where the authors babble about their personal lives for pages and pages before getting to the cooking: This article is about how to install bind and dhcpd and tie them together into a functional dynamic DNS setup for your LAN so that DHCP clients self-register with DNS, and you always have working forward and reverse DNS lookups. This article is intended to be part one of a two-part series, and in part two, we'll combine our bind DNS instance with an ACME-enabled LAN certificate authority and set up LetsEncrypt-style auto-renewing certificates for LAN services.
If that sounds like a fun couple of weekend projects, you're in the right place! If you want to fast-forward to where we start installing stuff, skip down a couple of subheds to the tutorial-y bits. Now, excuse me while I babble about my personal life.
My name is Lee, and I have a problem(Hi, Lee.)
It’s a fake: Mysterious 280 million-year-old fossil is mostly just black paint
Enlarge / Discovered in 1931, Tridentinosaurus antiquus has now been found to be, in part, a forgery. (credit: Valentina Rossi)
For more than 90 years, scientists have puzzled over an unusual 280 million-year-old reptilian fossil discovered in the Italian Alps. It's unusual because the skeleton is surrounded by a dark outline, long believed to be rarely preserved soft tissue. Alas, a fresh analysis employing a suite of cutting-edge techniques concluded that the dark outline is actually just bone-black paint. The fossil is a fake, according to a new paper published in the journal Paleontology.
An Italian engineer and museum employee named Gualtiero Adami found the fossil near the village of Piné. The fossil was a small lizard-like creature with a long neck and five-digit limbs. He turned it over to the local museum, and later that year, geologist Giorgio del Piaz announced the discovery of a new genus, dubbed Tridentinosaurus antiquus. The dark-colored body outline was presumed to be the remains of carbonized skin or flesh; fossilized plant material with carbonized leaf and shoot fragments were found in the same geographical area.
The specimen wasn't officially described scientifically until 1959 when Piero Leonardi declared it to be part of the Protorosauria group. He thought it was especially significant for understanding early reptile evolution because of the preservation of presumed soft tissue surrounding the skeletal remains. Some suggested that T. antiquus had been killed by a pyroclastic surge during a volcanic eruption, which would explain the carbonized skin since the intense heat would have burnt the outer layers almost instantly. It is also the oldest body fossil found in the Alps, at some 280 million years old.
Scientists aghast at bizarre AI rat with huge genitals in peer-reviewed article
Enlarge / An actual laboratory rat, who is intrigued. (credit: Getty | Photothek)
Appall and scorn ripped through scientists' social media networks Thursday as several egregiously bad AI-generated figures circulated from a peer-reviewed article recently published in a reputable journal. Those figures—which the authors acknowledge in the article's text were made by Midjourney—are all uninterpretable. They contain gibberish text and, most strikingly, one includes an image of a rat with grotesquely large and bizarre genitals, as well as a text label of "dck."
AI-generated Figure 1 of the paper. This image is supposed to show spermatogonial stem cells isolated, purified, and cultured from rat testes. (credit: Front. Cell Dev. Biol., Guo, Dong, Hao)
On Thursday, the publisher of the review article, Frontiers, posted an "expression of concern," noting that it is aware of concerns regarding the published piece. "An investigation is currently being conducted and this notice will be updated accordingly after the investigation concludes," the publisher wrote.The article in question is titled "Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway," which was authored by three researchers in China, including the corresponding author Dingjun Hao of Xi’an Honghui Hospital. It was published online Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology.