Star Trek icon Nichelle Nichols dead at 89

Nichelle Nichols made TV history with her portrayal of Nyota Uhura in Star Trek: the Original Series. (credit: CBS)

Actress Nichelle Nichols—who made history with her portrayal of Nyota Uhura on Star Trek: The Original Series—died Saturday, July 30, at the age of 89. Her son Kyle Johnson announced Nichols' passing on her official Instagram account, saying his mother had died of natural causes. Deadline Hollywood confirmed her passing with Gilbert Bell, her talent manager and business partner of 15 years. Nichols suffered a mild stroke in 2015 and was diagnosed with dementia in 2018. She rarely appeared in public after that.

(Last year we wrote about Woman in Motion, a new documentary about Nichols and her recruitment work for NASA, directed by Todd Thompson (streaming on Paramount+). Much of the following is adapted from that text.) 

Nichols started her career as a dancer and singer. She had wanted to become the first Black ballerina, and by age 14 landed her first gig at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago. She subsequently toured the US, Canada, and Europe with Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton before settling in Los Angeles in 1960 to pursue acting.

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The weekend’s best deals: Kindle Unlimited, Nintendo Switch games, and more

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It's the weekend, which means it's time for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a hefty discount on Amazon's Kindle Unlimited ebook subscription service. You'll have to be a new user to take advantage, but if you've been thinking about giving the service a try, Amazon is currently offering a four-month membership for $5. The subscription normally costs $10 a month after a 30-day free trial, so this discount saves you $25 in total.

Not every ebook included in Kindle Unlimited's library is a winner—a chunk of the selection consists of self-published works—and it's always possible to use apps like Libby to borrow ebooks from your local library for free. Still, the collection is large enough to cover plenty of works that are worthwhile, including a variety of magazines and comic books, and a subscription lets you take out up to 20 titles at a time. You don't need to own an actual Kindle device to access the library, either.

At its normal going rate, Kindle Unlimited's value is more questionable, but this deal should make it less risky to see if the service is worth it for you. If you do subscribe, note that your subscription will be set to auto-renew at the normal $10-per-month rate, but you can cancel your membership immediately after signing up without losing access to the discounted trial period.

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Apple Watch buying guide: Which wearable is best for you?

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Broadly speaking, recommending an Apple Watch is simple: If you use an iPhone and want a smartwatch, staying in-house with Apple will usually be your best bet.

But there are several Apple Watches on the market right now. The introduction of the Apple Watch Series 7 in September 2021 brought Apple's lifetime total to nine, with the company currently offering three models in stores: the Series 7, SE, and Series 3. Among those, there are multiple variants that differ in size, connectivity, design, and price.

Then there are older-but-still-updated generations you can dig up from third-party retailers like Best Buy and Amazon, as well as options to buy refurbished devices. Everyone has different needs, and you may be able to find an Apple Watch that’s less expensive and more attuned to your desires by going these routes.

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Milky seas, a bioluminescent event visible from space

Enlarge / The boat trip went through an area of milky sea south of the lights of an island. (credit: Steven Miller, Leon Schommer, and Naomi McKinnon)

On some moonless nights, enormous patches of the Northwest Indian Ocean and seas around Indonesia begin to glow. This event has been witnessed by hundreds of sailors, but only one research vessel has ever, by pure chance, come across this bioluminescent phenomenon, known as milky seas. Thanks to that vessel, samples showed that the source of the light was a bacteria called V. harveyi, which had colonized a microalgae called Phaocystis. But that was back in 1988, and researchers have yet to be in the right place and the right time to catch one of these events again.

Both the bacteria and algae are common to those waters, so it’s not clear what triggers these rare events. To help understand why milky seas form, researchers have gotten much better at spotting these swaths of bioluminescence from the skies. With the help of satellites, Stephen Miller, a professor of atmospheric science, has been collecting both images and eyewitness accounts of milky seas for nearly 20 years. Thanks to improvements in the imaging capabilities over the past decades, Miller published a compilation last year of probable milky seas in the time frame of 2012 to 2021, including one occurrence south of Java, Indonesia, in summer 2019.

But these satellite observations lacked surface confirmation—that is, until the crew of the yacht Ganesha reached out to Miller with their first-hand account of what they had experienced during their trip through the seas around Java that August, which was recently published in PNAS. Their eyewitness corroboration—along with the first photographs of a milky sea—show that these satellites are indeed a powerful tool for spotting these events.

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US regulators will certify first small nuclear reactor design

Enlarge / NuScale's reactor-in-a-can. (credit: NuScale)

On Friday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced that it would be issuing a certification to a new nuclear reactor design, making it just the seventh that has been approved for use in the US. But in some ways, it's a first: the design, from a company called NuScale, is a small modular reactor that can be constructed at a central facility and then moved to the site where it will be operated.

The move was expected after the design received an okay during its final safety evaluation in 2020.

Small modular reactors have been promoted as avoiding many of the problems that have made large nuclear plants exceedingly expensive to build. They're small enough that they can be assembled on a factory floor and then shipped to the site where they will operate, eliminating many of the challenges of custom, on-site construction. In addition, they're structured in a way to allow passive safety, where no operator actions are necessary to shut the reactor down if problems occur.

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NASA revises Mars’ sample return plan to use helicopters

Enlarge (credit: NASAJPL-Caltech)

On Wednesday, NASA announced that it had made major changes to its plan for returning samples from the surface of Mars in the early 2030s. Currently being collected by the Perseverance rover, the samples are set to be moved to Earth by a relay of rovers and rockets. Now, inspired by the success of the Ingenuity helicopter, NASA is saying it can lose one of the rovers, replacing it with a pair of helicopters instead.

The Mars sample return plan involves a large collection of challenges, but a central one is that the samples are currently in Perseverance, but eventually have to end up in a rocket that takes off from the surface of Mars. That means that Perseverance will have to get close enough to the rocket's landing site—which we can't choose precisely—to exchange the samples, possibly diverting it from scientific objectives. It also can't be too close when the rocket lands since the rocket's landing and its associated hardware could pose a risk to the rover and its samples.

The original plan included a contingency. Perseverance would approach after the rocket had landed, and the samples would be transferred directly. If that didn't work out for whatever reason, a second rover sent to Mars by the ESA would act as an intermediary, visiting a site where the samples had been cached, retrieving them, and then delivering them to the rocket.

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The players are the problem: Community managers complain of excessive harassment

I'll show that know-it-all community manager who's boss...

In video games, community management is all about listening to the concerns of the fans and communicating with them in a way that makes them feel that their concerns are being heard. But what happens when some of the concerned players become a cause for concern themselves?

That's the question two major gaming companies have faced in recent days, with community managers saying that harassment from customers is making it harder for them to do their jobs.

The first example comes from the Destiny 2 community on Reddit, where one member posted Wednesday lamenting the shrinking number of threads that receive an official reply from Bungie. Destiny 2 Community Manager Dylan "dmg04" Gafner responded to explain that he has taken some time off due to "some serious harassment towards me and my family," which has led to "an amount of reduced communications as the team plans future protections / strategies to help avoid these sorts of things."

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You won’t be confused about electric vehicle charging after reading this

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

A significant factor that scares people away from electric vehicles is confusion over charging. Every gas station in the land is fitted with nozzles that will fill any gasoline-powered car's fuel tank. But not all EVs use the same plug, and then there's the matter of alternating current (AC) versus direct current (DC) systems. And what do the different levels of charging mean?

The good news is that it's not that complicated, and we're here to explain everything you need to know.

EVs require electricity to charge, as the "E" in EV suggests. But that electricity can be AC, like the appliances in your home, or DC, like a USB device, only many times more powerful.

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Carbon offsets alone won’t make flying climate-friendly

Enlarge / The evening sun colors the underside of the Boeing 747 and the following contrail red in Berlin in 2021. (credit: Soeren Stache/Picture Alliance/Getty )

Jet A-1, a straw-colored, kerosene-based fuel used in most big airplanes, is a difficult substance to replace. It’s packed with energy; per unit of weight, at least 60 times as much as the lithium-ion batteries used to propel electric cars. It’s also terrible for the climate. So as the aviation industry has gradually climbed aboard global pledges to get rid of carbon emissions, it has mostly promised to make up for its damage elsewhere—through offsets that might involve planting trees, restoring wetlands, or paying people to preserve ecosystems that otherwise would have been razed. But according to a growing body of research, those efforts leave something out: Most of the planet-warming effects of flying aren’t from carbon dioxide.

Burning jet fuel at 35,000 feet sparks a molecular cascade in the troposphere. The initial combustion releases a shower of particles—sulfur, nitrogen oxides, soot, and water vapor. At those frigid heights, some of the particles become nuclei around which condensation gathers and then quickly freezes, helping to produce puffy contrails that either vanish or persist as wispy, high-altitude cirrus clouds. In the presence of the Sun’s rays, nitrogen molecules set off a chain of reactions that produce ozone and destroy free-floating atmospheric methane. It's tough to pin down the meaning of all this chemistry. Some of these reactions, like the methane destruction, help cool the Earth. Others warm it. It all depends on the atmospheric conditions for each flight, multiplied across tens of thousands of planes streaking across the sky each day.

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FDA’s top tobacco scientist takes job at Marlboro-maker Philip Morris

Enlarge / Philip Morris Marlboro brand cigarettes are displayed for sale at a gas station in Tiskilwa, Illinois, U.S., on Wednesday, July 12, 2017. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

The top tobacco scientist at the Food and Drug Administration has left his job to go work for tobacco giant Philip Morris International (PMI), best known as the maker of Marlboro cigarettes.

It is the second high-profile FDA hire by PMI in recent months, and it comes at a time when the FDA is struggling to regulate the evolving smoking and vaping products by companies such as PMI. Earlier this month, for instance, the FDA announced an embarrassing backpedal in its bungled attempt to ban Juul e-cigarette products. Juul—largely blamed for an epidemic of youth vaping—is partly owned by Altria, which spun-off PMI in 2008.

On Tuesday, Matt Holmon, director of the Office of Science at the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products (CTP), announced his departure, effective immediately, to accept a position at PMI. Holmon, a biochemist by training, was at the FDA for over 20 years and director of the CTP's Office of Science since 2017.

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Study sheds light on how dogs recognize their favorite toys

A new study found that dogs form a “multi-model mental image” of their toys.

Specific breeds of dogs, like border collies, can learn the verbal names of their favorite toys, but what is going on in the dog's mind when it's told to fetch a given toy? According to a recent paper published in the journal Animal Cognition, these dogs store key sensory features about their toys—notably what they look like and how they smell—and recall those features when searching for the named toy.

"If we can understand which senses dogs use while searching for a toy, this may reveal how they think about it," said co-author Shany Dror, a biologist at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary. "When dogs use olfaction or sight while searching for a toy, this indicates that they know how that toy smells or looks like."

Prior studies suggested that dogs typically rely on vision, or a combination of sight and smell, to locate target objects. Few dogs can also identify objects based on verbal labels, which the authors call "gifted word learner" (GWL) dogs. "Just like humans, GWL dogs not only recognize the labeled objects—or categories of objects—as stimuli they have already encountered, but they also identify them among other similarly familiar named objects, based on their verbal labels," the authors wrote. They wanted to investigate whether GWL dogs have an enhanced ability to discriminate and/or recognize objects compared to typical dogs.

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Zuckerberg: Apple, Meta are in “deep, philosophical competition”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (credit: Facebook)

Meta and Apple are entering a period of "very deep, philosophical competition" that will define the future of the Internet, according to comments by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg obtained by The Verge.

Both Apple and Meta are planning to invest heavily in mixed reality over the next decade, but they have diametrically opposed visions for what the AR/VR/XR landscape should ideally look like.

The Verge obtained an audio recording of an all-hands employee meeting at Meta, in which Zuckerberg answered an employee question about the company's future competition with Apple in great detail. His comments shed some light on how Meta, at least, sees the rivalry.

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How to use free virtualization apps to safely test the macOS Ventura betas

Enlarge / Virtualizing macOS versions like the Ventura beta is a good way to experiment without blowing away your main OS install. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

One of the coolest power-user Mac features of the Apple Silicon era is Apple's Virtualization framework. Normally the purview of paid software like Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion, virtualization lets you run multiple operating systems on one Mac at the same time, which is useful for anyone who wants to run Linux on top of macOS, test an app they're developing in different versions of macOS, or take a look at the latest macOS Ventura beta without risking their main install.

Apple’s documentation and sample projects provide everything you need to get a simple VM up and running with no additional software required. Still, some independent developers have built simple, free apps on top of the Virtualization framework that provides a GUI for customizing settings and juggling multiple guest OSes.

Getting ready to virtualize

My favorite for running macOS on top of macOS is VirtualBuddy, which streamlines the process of downloading the files you need to get a Monterey or Ventura virtual machine up and running. This is the app we’ll be using to set up our sample VM in this guide.

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Newly found Lightning Framework offers a plethora of Linux hacking capabilities

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The software framework has become essential to developing almost all complex software these days. The Django Web framework, for instance, bundles all the libraries, image files, and other components needed to quickly build and deploy web apps, making it a mainstay at companies like Google, Spotify, and Pinterest. Frameworks provide a platform that performs common functions like logging and authentication shared across an app ecosystem.

Last week, researchers from security firm Intezer revealed the Lightning Framework, a modular malware framework for Linux that has gone undocumented until now. Lightning Framework is post-exploit malware, meaning it gets installed after an attacker has already gained access to a targeted machine. Once installed, it can provide some of the same efficiencies and speed to Linux compromises that Django provides for web development.

“It is rare to see such an intricate framework developed for targeting Linux systems,” Ryan Robinson, a security researcher at Intezer, wrote in a post. “Lightning is a modular framework we discovered that has a plethora of capabilities, and the ability to install multiple types of rootkit, as well as the capability to run plugins.”

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Out of prison, Shkreli plans “Web3 drug discovery” platform backed by crypto

Martin Shkreli being photographed for his role as CIO of MSMB Capital Management. (credit: Getty Images)

Martin Shkreli—the notorious ex-pharmaceutical executive fresh from prison after his 2017 fraud conviction—announced his latest, eyebrow-raising venture Monday: creating a blockchain-based "Web3 drug discovery platform" that traffics in his own cryptocurrency, MSI, aka Martin Shkreli Inu.

The platform, still in the early development phase, is called Druglike, according to a press release that circulated Monday. The platform's goals are ostensibly lofty, but the details are extremely sketchy, and Shkreli's intentions have already drawn skepticism. It's also unclear if the enterprise will run Shkreli afoul of his lifetime ban from the pharmaceutical industry, which stemmed from the abrupt and callous 4,000 percent price hike of a life-saving drug that made him infamous.

Shkreli, who is named as a co-founder of Druglike, says the platform aims to make early-stage drug discovery more affordable and accessible. "Druglike will remove barriers to early-stage drug discovery, increase innovation and allow a broader group of contributors to share the rewards," Shkreli said in the press release. "Underserved and underfunded communities, such as those focused on rare diseases or in developing markets, will also benefit from access to these tools."

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One week later, astronomers find a galaxy even deeper back in time

Enlarge / The James Webb Space Telescope continues to deliver on its promises on discovering early galaxies. (credit: NASA)

Data from the Webb Space Telescope has only gotten into the hands of astronomers over the last few weeks, but they've been waiting for years for this, and apparently had analyses set to go. The result has been something like a race back in time, as new discoveries find objects that formed ever closer to the Big Bang that produced our Universe. Last week, one of these searches turned up a galaxy that was present less than 400 million years after the Big Bang. This week, a new analysis has picked out a galaxy as it appeared only 233 million years after the Universe popped into existence.

The discovery is a happy byproduct of work that was designed to answer a more general question: How many galaxies should we expect to see at different time points after the Big Bang?

Back in time

As we mentioned last week, the early Universe was opaque to light at any wavelengths that carry more energy than is needed to ionize hydrogen. That energy is in the UV portion of the spectrum, but the red shift caused by 13 billion years of an expanding Universe has shifted that cutoff point into the infrared portion of the spectrum. To find galaxies from this time, we have to look for objects that aren't visible at shorter infrared wavelengths (meaning that light was once above the hydrogen cutoff), but do appear at lower-energy wavelengths.

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Logitech G715 hands-on: A strong typist with a polarizing look

Enlarge / Logitech G713 keyboard. (credit: Scharon Harding)

In an explosion of color, Logitech today announced a bunch of PC peripherals draped in light shades, wireless options, and, love it or hate it, RGB lighting.

Logitech's calling it the Aurora Collection, and while the gadgets are aimed at gamers, high programmability and premium features can make them interesting to general power users, too.

Logitech's Aurora Collection includes a broad range of PC peripherals and accessories. (credit: Logitech)

The new series is characterized by trendy white colors intensified by RGB LEDs and high price tags. The series includes the G735 wireless headset ($230), the G705 wireless mouse ($100), the G713 mechanical keyboard ($170), and its wireless version, the G715 ($200). There are also Aurora PC accessories, including top plates and keycaps for the keyboards and new Aurora colors for some of Logitech's previously released microphones.

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New hypothesis emerges to explain mysterious hepatitis cases in kids

Enlarge / Liver lesions in patient with chronic active hepatitis C. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

Researchers in the United Kingdom have come up with the most detailed, complex hypothesis yet to explain the burst of mysterious cases of liver inflammation—aka hepatitis—in young children, which has troubled medical experts worldwide for several months.

The cases first came to light in April, when doctors noted an unusual cluster of hepatitis cases in young children in Scotland. The illnesses were not linked to any known cause of hepatitis, such as hepatitis (A to E) viruses, making them unexplained. Though unexplained cases of pediatric hepatitis arise from time to time, a report that month noted 13 cases in Scotland in two months when the country would typically see fewer than four in a year.

Since then, the World Health Organization has tallied more than 1,000 probable cases from 35 countries. Of those cases, 46 required liver transplants, and 22 died. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified 355 cases in the US. As of June 22, 20 US cases required liver transplants, and 11 died.

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Climate change is turning up the heat on lakes

Enlarge (credit: Layland Masuda)

Not for nothing, but when it comes to bodies of water and climate change, the ocean gets the (sea) lion's share of attention. But on land, around 117 million admittedly smaller bodies of water play necessary ecological, social, and economic roles. Lakes are relatively tiny, but "relative" is a key term there—for instance, the Great Lakes of North America account for 20 percent of the Earth's surface freshwater. We also rely on them for food, fresh water, transportation, and more.

New research identifies the interrelated challenges that the world's lakes face. According to Sapna Sharma, co-author of the research and an associate professor of York University's biology department, many of the climate change-related impacts that these watering holes remain relatively hidden despite these waters potentially facing an extensive collection of problems. "I hope that people get a sense of how widespread the effects of climate change on lakes are," she told Ars. "If you just go look out at a lake, you might not know all the changes it's experiencing."

To study this, Sharma and colleagues at different universities around the world pored over hundreds of research papers about lakes. These papers came from across the globe, and some date back to the 1930s, she said. Sharma and her fellow researchers all have differing areas of expertise, allowing them to review and synthesize the existing literature.

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NFL+ is here, but it’s probably not what you’re looking for

Enlarge / The NFL is hugely popular in the US, but the streaming and broadcast rights are uniquely complicated. (credit: velo_city)

After months of rumors and teases, the National Football League has launched a new streaming video service. Unfortunately, the new service has limitations, as it's caught up in a tangled mess of arrangements with different services.

NFL+ replaces NFL Game Pass, which offered more utility but was $99.99 annually. NFL+ costs $4.99 monthly or $39.99 per year. TechCrunch reports that NFL Game Pass subscribers will be automatically moved to NFL+.

The new service "offers access to live out-of-market preseason games, live local and primetime regular season and postseason games (phone and tablet only), live local and national audio for every game, NFL Network shows on-demand, NFL Films archives and more," according to the NFL's press release.

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2K relents to fans, turns servers back on for abandoned “4v1” online game

Enlarge / Evolve's unique 4v1 battling is now back online—and while access is limited, we still count this as a victory for game history preservation. (credit: 2K Games / Turtle Rock)

From a preservation standpoint, the modern shift to "always-online" video games has been a disaster. We've seen it repeatedly: A developer stops "supporting" an online game, and then the rug is pulled out from fans who might try to hack their way into playing the game among friends, leaving all access in tatters.

In the case of the four-on-one online shooter Evolve, however, the reverse has been true—and in a surprise twist, this 2K-published, Turtle Rock-developed game has been given more life this week than in the four years since its support was shut down.

Stage 2... part 2

Before I explain, I should clarify the worst news. This previously free-to-play game is now all but impossible to access if you didn't previously own or claim it, and there's no clear path to playing it due to the game's delisting from online retailers in September 2018. Apparently, working download "keys" for the game's free-to-play (F2P) version, which went live in 2016, may still be floating around.

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Google fires Blake Lemoine, the engineer who claimed AI chatbot is a person

Enlarge / Former Google engineer Blake Lemoine. (credit: Getty Images | Washington Post)

Google has fired Blake Lemoine, the software engineer who was previously put on paid leave after claiming the company's LaMDA chatbot is sentient. Google said Lemoine, who worked in the company's Responsible AI unit, violated data security policies.

"If an employee shares concerns about our work, as Blake did, we review them extensively. We found Blake's claims that LaMDA is sentient to be wholly unfounded and worked to clarify that with him for many months," Google said in a statement provided to Ars and other news organizations.

Lemoine confirmed on Friday that "Google sent me an email terminating my employment with them," The Wall Street Journal wrote. Lemoine also reportedly said he's talking with lawyers "about what the appropriate next steps are." Google's statement called it "regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information."

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Report: YouTube is in the running for NFL Sunday Ticket

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A report this weekend from The New York Times says that YouTube is the latest bidder for the NFL's flagship content package, NFL Sunday Ticket. There's still no winner in the bidding process, but Google's video division is jumping into the fray to do battle with Apple, who, the Times says, is "considered the front-runner" in the deal. The winning bid is expected to run upward of $2.5 billion per season.

NFL Sunday Ticket offers every out-of-market, regular-season Sunday afternoon game as a giant, ~$300-a-year cable package. Nationally televised games and your local games aren't included in the package, but it's everything else you normally wouldn't be able to watch—around 13 extra games per week. In the US, the service has been (mostly) exclusive to satellite TV provider DirecTV for years, with the last deal being signed in 2014 for $1.5 billion per year. DirecTV's current deal expires at the end of this upcoming season, and due to plummeting TV subscribers, the beleaguered DirecTV no longer has the cash to re-up with the NFL. That means Sunday Ticket is up for grabs as the next major chess piece in The Streaming Wars.

Amazon was the first tech giant to jump into the NFL world by acquiring another major NFL package, Thursday Night Football, for $1 billion per year. Amazon has previously dipped its toes into the NFL waters by simulcasting Fox Thursday night games, but this year, Amazon's Prime Video exclusivity means Amazon needs to do its own production work. So far, it seems to be gearing up for a top-class production: The company poached legendary play-by-play announcer Al Michaels from NBC and hired NBC's 24-time Emmy-winning executive producer, Fred Gaudelli (who is executive-producing both NBC's and Amazon's NFL packages now). Amazon has also hired a bevy of former NFL players to host the pregame, halftime, and postgame shows: Hall of Fame tight end Tony Gonzalez, future Hall of Fame cornerback Richard Sherman, and recently retired quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick. It sounds like Amazon is sparing no expense.

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Helen Mirren is a vengeful goddess in Shazam! Fury of the Gods trailer

Official trailer for Shazam! Fury of the Gods.

The DC panel at San Diego Comic-Con highlighted the first official trailer for Shazam! Fury of the Gods, the sequel to 2019's Shazam!, both starring Zachary Levi. As a bonus, Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock) wowed the crowd by making a grand entrance in full costume to introduce exclusive new teaser footage from his (related) upcoming film Black Adam.

The 2019 Shazam! introduced a teen foster kid named Billy Batson (Asher Angel), who has landed in a group home after running away from another one to hunt for his birth mother. He saves his new foster brother, Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer), from bullies, and when they chase him into the subway, he's transported to the Rock of Eternity. There, the ancient wizard Shazam (Djimon Hounsou) chooses Billy to be his new champion. When Billy says "Shazam!" he transforms into an adult superhero (Levi); repeating the word returns him to his Billy form. Billy/Shazam defeats a supervillain and shares his power with all his foster siblings, making his own family of superheroes.

The film grossed $366 worldwide and received mostly positive reviews. In his 2019 review of Shazam!, Ars Tech Culture Editor Sam Machkovech concluded, "It's fun. It's funny. It's fine," despite a few nitpicky flaws. "The end result is a superhero film that leans brazenly into an Indiana Jones vibe (complete with a John Williams-caliber score) along with a healthy dollop of Deadpool-for-kids gags about the wider DC Comics universe."

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No sugarcoating: Donut math yields way to make qubits last longer

Enlarge / An ion trap, the quantum hardware that was used for this work. (credit: Honeywell)

You can almost hear the indrawn breath from newsrooms around the world. Specialist science journalists have hidden themselves in the bathroom to weep quietly. The cause of such despair? Someone has released a paper containing the word "topology"—something no one knows how to explain, which forces people to resort to metaphors about donuts being forced to become coffee cups, despite there being neither coffee nor donuts on offer.

And although topology is fundamental to the new results, it is also tangential to explaining them (in my view, anyway). So what are those results?

One of the big problems with quantum computers is that they accumulate errors, and the speed at which that happens limits the complexity of the problems they can solve. This new paper shows how to reduce errors, not by engineering but by understanding (and using) the right quantum states and their coupling to generate a system that is naturally more immune to certain types of noise. So grab a coffee and a donut, and let's dive into the noisy world of qubits.

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Better than a GLB: Driving the Mercedes-Benz EQB electric SUV

Enlarge / A shiny black panel instead of a front grille, and more aero-efficient wheels are some of the subtle clues that this is a Mercedes-Benz EQB and not a Mercedes-Benz GLB. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Mercedes-Benz provided flights from DC to Stuttgart and back, plus two nights in a hotel so we could drive the EQB and the Vision EQXX. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

IMMENDINGEN, GERMANY—You have to be very observant to spot the difference between Mercedes-Benz's new EQB electric crossover and its GLB crossover that has been around for a couple of years now. Most obviously, there's that big glossy black panel in place of the traditional grille, now a common feature on all Mercedes EVs, but you'll also note slightly more aerodynamic wheels and the lack of any exhaust pipes, plus the EQ badges on the back, of course. And a look underneath the car reveals a flat underfloor that helps the flow of air around the vehicle in motion.

It's the latest EV from Mercedes-Benz, and it's the cheapest EV on sale to wear a three-pointed star, starting at $54,500.

The biggest difference between the GLB we tested in 2020 and the EQB is the powertrain. Open the hood and you're greeted by a mess of mechanicals, although a closer look reveals this to be the EQB's front electric motor, plus control electronics and HVAC componentry instead of a turbocharged four-cylinder engine. For the US, there's a single choice of lithium-ion traction battery with a useable capacity of 66.5 kWh (70.5 kWh gross), operating at 420 V.

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever teaser is a moving tribute to Chadwick Boseman

A teaser for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever closed out Marvel's San Diego Comic Con panel.

It's been three years since the last in-person San Diego Comic Con and Marvel Studios pulled out all the stops for its panel in Hall H, giving us a jam-packed overview of Phases Four, Five, and Six in the MCU. We got a new trailer for She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and those in attendance were able to view exclusive sneak peek teasers for Ant-Man: Quantumania, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and a new crossover series event called Secret Invasion. The panel ended with the first teaser for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Wakanda Forever was already in development when Chadwick Boseman—who played T'Challa in 2018's Black Panther—died of colon cancer in August 2020. Director Ryan Coogler, Marvel's Kevin Feige, and many others had been unaware that Boseman was even ill. They decided not to recast T'Challa, nor would they try to insert the character using visual effects, although most of the other main cast members are returning. "His portrayal... is iconic and transcends any iteration of the character in any other medium from Marvel's past," Feige said in a December 2020 statement.

The finished film is in many ways a tribute to Boseman, and the trailer evokes that sense of loss, set to an almost elegiac cover of "No Woman No Cry." There's even a shot of a street mural honoring a deceased T'Challa. T'Challa's mother Ramonda (Angela Bassett) and sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) are grieving the loss of their brother, with Ramonda currently sitting on the throne. "I am queen of the most powerful nation in the world and my entire family is gone," she says in the only lines of dialogue. "Have I not given everything?"

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We test an electric Mercedes that can can go 747 miles on a single charge

Enlarge / There's only one Mercedes-Benz Vision EQXX, so bringing it back in one piece was important. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Mercedes-Benz provided flights from DC to Stuttgart and back, plus two nights in a hotel so we could drive the Vision EQXX as well as the EQB (which you can read about on Monday). Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

IMMENDINGEN, GERMANY—Driving off in the Mercedes-Benz Vision EQXX was slightly more stressful than I anticipated. Not that it's difficult to drive, or to see out of the low-slung streamliner, but it's also the only one in existence. Mercedes wouldn't tell us the program's exact budget, simply warning us that the sole EQXX should be considered priceless, but I'd guess somewhere in the range of three Bugatti Pur Sports.

Like the Bugatti, the EQXX was built to an engineering brief—in this case to build an electric vehicle capable of at least 621 miles (1,000km) on a single charge. Also like the Bugatti, it's road-legal: in April of this year, less than two years after the project was given the green light, the team drove the EV 625 miles (1,006 km) from Sindelfingen in Germany to Cassis, France, arriving with a 15 percent state of charge in the battery.

Two months later, they followed that up with a longer drive that involved descending down fewer mountains, driving from Stuttgart, Germany to the Silverstone racetrack in the UK, where reigning Formula E champion Nyck de Vries then used the remaining charge to drive some hot laps, the car eventually completing 747 miles (1,202 km) before coming to a halt in the pit lane.

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Review: Framework’s next-gen Laptop follows through on its upgradeable promises

Enlarge / The Framework Laptop is back with internal and external upgrades. It largely follows through on its promises of repairability and upgradeability. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It's one thing to say you're making a fully user-serviceable, upgradeable laptop. It's another thing to actually follow through with it.

The original Framework Laptop we reviewed last year did a lot of things right. It's easy to open and work on, the ports can be swapped out to suit your needs, and it's sturdy and well-built enough to stand up to traditional, less-upgradeable-and-repairable ultrabooks like Dell's XPS 13 or Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

But making "one surprisingly good laptop" isn't the same as creating a laptop ecosystem with upgradeable, interchangeable, user-serviceable parts. To do that, you need to keep up with new component releases. You need to address the shortcomings of your original design (or even release new revisions) without ending support for or breaking compatibility with previous versions of your design. And your small, independent company needs to continue to exist so it can keep getting all that work done, year after year, for a few years.

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Keanu Reeves dropped by Comic-Con to reveal John Wick 4 sneak peek teaser

Keanu Reeves is back as our favorite master assassin in John Wick: Chapter 4.

The movie won't hit theaters until March 2023, but that didn't stop Keanu Reeves from swinging by Comic-Con to introduce a sneak peek teaser for John Wick Chapter 4, simply titled John Wick (which might be confusing given that this is also the title of the original film that launched the whole franchise). According to Deadline Hollywood, Reeves crashed the Collider’s Directors on Directing panel, which included John Wick: Chapter 4 director Chad Stahelski as a panelist.

(Spoilers for the first three films in the franchise below.)

As I've written previously, for the benefit of those who missed the first three movies, John Wick (Reeves) is a legendary hitman (known as the Boogeyman or "Baba Yaga") who tried to retire when he fell in love and got married. Unfortunately, he's drawn back into the dark underground world by an act of senseless violence after his wife's death. Nothing will stop John Wick from seeking retribution. The first John Wick grossed more than $88 million worldwide for a film that cost around $30 million to make, and it was praised for its brisk pace, heart-stopping action sequences, and stylish noir feel.

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Past environmental threats didn’t just disappear

Enlarge / We have pretty clear evidence that declining ozone levels were something more than liberal scare tactics. (credit: NASA)

Conservative political commentator Matt Walsh took to Twitter last Wednesday to say that the widely held belief that humans are causing climate change is, in fact, a crock. The podcaster and Daily Wire columnist apparently knows this because previous environmental issues we were concerned about in the past—namely acid rain and holes in the ozone layer—disappeared, never to be heard about again.

“Remember when they spent years telling us to panic over the hole in the ozone layer and then suddenly just stopped talking about it and nobody ever mentioned the ozone layer again?” Walsh tweeted. “This was also back during the time when they scared school children into believing that "acid rain" was a real and urgent threat,” Walsh tweeted again.

It’s true that you don’t hear much about acid rain anymore, and discussions about humanity’s long-standing propensity to metaphorically kick the planet in the groin have largely moved away from the ozone layer to newer, flashier issues like sea level rise, rising global temperatures, and mass species die-offs served with a side of ecosystem collapse. (Although, if you know where to look, you can still find mention of the ozone hole.)

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The Terraforming Mars card game is as good as we’d hoped it would be

The 2016 board game Terraforming Mars is an amazing title.

As evidence, I present the following image:

Note: This image, of a chintzy player mat stamped with clip-art-quality design work, is not from the game we are looking at today. (credit: Nate Anderson)

If a game this ugly can capture the hearts, minds, and continued attention of the devotees of the overcrowded board game market to become a modern classic, you know it’s something special.

And if a board game becomes popular, you can be sure of one thing: A card game version will eventually arrive. If that’s a hit, get ready for the dice version. And then, market willing, comes the roll-and-write version. That may sound like cynical resignation to cash-grabby companies endlessly returning to the same well, but these reimagined versions aren’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, some of my favorite games are card or dice versions of “bigger” board games.

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Ford secures battery supplies for 600,000 EVs a year from 2023

Enlarge / Ford's electric F-150 Lighting (L), eTransit (M), and Mustang Mach-E (R) battery-electric vehicles have all been such successes that they're all sold out for the rest of the year. (credit: Ford)

On Thursday, Ford Motor Company announced that it has secured 60 GWh of battery cells that will allow it to build 600,000 electric vehicles by late 2023. And it says it has contracts for cells that will allow it to build 1.4 million EVs by 2026, 70 percent of the 2 million EVs it plans to build globally that year.

"Ford's new electric vehicle lineup has generated huge enthusiasm and demand, and now we are putting the industrial system in place to scale quickly," said Jim Farley, Ford’s president and CEO and president of Ford Model e. "Our Model e team has moved with speed, focus, and creativity to secure the battery capacity and raw materials we need to deliver breakthrough EVs for millions of customers."

The automaker says that its plan for 2023 will consist of 270,000 Mustang Mach-Es for North America, Europe, and China, 150,000 F-150 Lightnings for North America, 150,000 e-Transit vans for North America and Europe, and it will launch an additional electric SUV in Europe, building 30,000 in 2023 before ramping up production significantly in 2024.

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The USPS will buy a lot more electric next-gen delivery vans

Enlarge / No, this isn't a rendering from a Pixar film; it's what the new USPS mail delivery vehicle will look like. (credit: USPS)

In 2021, the United States Postal Service picked a new delivery vehicle to replace its fleet of aging Grumman LLVs. However, the USPS drew immediate criticism, as the vast majority of a potential 165,000 Next Generation Delivery Vehicles, which will be built by Oshkosh Defense, would not be electric.

But on Wednesday, the USPS changed its mind and says it will now limit its NGDV purchase to 50,000 NGDVs, at least half of which will be battery-electric vehicles. Additionally, it says it will purchase 34,500 commercial off-the-shelf vehicles, "including as many BEVs as are commercially available and consistent with our delivery profile" according to the Federal Register.

Oshkosh's NGDV has been designed to be fitted with either an internal combustion engine or a battery-electric powertrain. When the USPS first selected the NGDV, it said that only 10 percent of the order would be for BEV mail vans—Postmaster Louis DeJoy pleaded poverty on behalf of the Postal Service, which he said could not afford to purchase more BEVs.

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The SLS rocket finally has a believable launch date, and it’s soon

Enlarge / NASA's Space Launch System rocket is seen on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in April. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

NASA officials said Wednesday that the space agency continues to make progress preparing the massive Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for a launch later this summer. Moreover, they now have enough confidence to set a launch date: August 29.

Under the agency's current plans, the stacked SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft will roll out to its launch site at Kennedy Space Center on August 18. Then, there would be three opportunities—August 29, September 2, and September 5—to launch the vehicle before the window closes.

"These are the dates we are working toward today," said Jim Free, the chief of NASA's human exploration systems development program.

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Judge dismisses lawsuit over alleged “monopoly pricing” on PlayStation Store

A judge has dismissed a class action lawsuit that argued Sony was abusing its monopoly power in the digital PlayStation games market. But the dismissal leaves room for an amended complaint with additional factual context to move forward with the same "viable" antitrust arguments.

The lawsuit, originally filed last May, hinged on Sony's 2019 decision to stop allowing physical and online retailers from selling digital download codes for games on the PSN store (as Nintendo and Microsoft still allow). That decision was "specifically intended to and did eliminate price competition from other digital video game retailers," the lawsuit alleged, forcing players "to pay a higher price for digital PlayStation games than they would in a free and unrestrained competitive retail market."

But in a ruling filed last week (as noted by Bloomberg Law), Northern California District Judge Richard Seeborg wrote that the class action plaintiffs didn't provide "sufficient factual detail" that Sony "voluntarily terminated a profitable practice" in removing the retail download codes.

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CDC clears Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine aimed at enticing vaccine holdouts [Updated]

Enlarge / The Novavax Inc. Nuvaxovid COVID-19 vaccine. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg )

Update 7/20/2022 10:35am ET: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday signed off on the use of Novavax's COVID-19 vaccine for unvaccinated adults ages 18 and older. The vaccine, which is intended to tempt vaccine holdouts with its more traditional design, should become available in the coming weeks, the CDC said.

On Tuesday afternoon, a panel of independent expert advisors for the CDC—the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices—voted unanimously (12-to-0) in favor of recommending use of the Novavax vaccine after reviewing efficacy and safety data. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky endorsed their recommendation hours later, completing the last step before the vaccine can go into arms.

"Today, we have expanded the options available to adults in the US by recommending another safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine," Walensky said in a statement Tuesday evening. "If you have been waiting for a COVID-19 vaccine built on a different technology than those previously available, now is the time to join the millions of Americans who have been vaccinated. With COVID-19 cases on the rise again across parts of the country, vaccination is critical to help protect against the complications of severe COVID-19 disease."

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Review: Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Go 2 has a lot of problems, but I like it anyway

Enlarge / Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go 2. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Anyone who buys a Microsoft Surface Laptop Go 2 should go into it fully aware of the laptop's shortcomings.

The first and most important is that the base model, the one that gives it its attractive $600 starting price, comes with only 4GB of non-upgradeable RAM and should be ignored by pretty much everybody. Seriously, don't buy it, and don't try to talk yourself into it just to save money.

Behave as though the actual starting price is $700, the amount it costs to get the configuration with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. This is still closer to "budget" than "high-end" as ultrabooks go, but the list of omissions, shortcomings, and odd decisions does get harder to overlook as you spend more money. The generation-old processor. The un-backlit keyboard. The tiny port selection. A touchscreen that is neither particularly high-resolution nor very colorful. A 128GB SSD that will feel cramped for many people, and a 256GB option that (1) isn't all that much bigger and (2) adds another $100 to the price.

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Bungie sues serial Destiny 2 cheater who threatened employees

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Leone dodging yet another account ban.

When it comes to players cheating in online games, a permanent ban is usually the worst punishment a publisher will dish out (either for that specific game or the company's whole catalog). Now, though, Bungie is going to court to stop one serial Destiny 2 cheater who the company says has repeatedly and publicly evaded the developer's bans and escalated to threats and harassment against Bungie and its employees.

The full lawsuit (first reported by TorrentFreak) says that describing defendant Luca Leone as "a serial ban evader and cheater... would be a vast understatement." Leone, who streams on Twitch under the handle miffysworld, has seen 13 separate accounts banned for cheating since late May, Bungie said. That includes many accounts for which Leone directly streamed evidence of cheating. Leone even tweeted about "a clip of me flying with infinite ammo walls and aimbot" on a now-protected Twitter account.

About a year after Destiny 2 went free-to-play in late 2019, Bungie implemented a new verification system intended to deter cheaters. That system requires new accounts to confirm a fresh phone number via SMS to access certain high-level content like raids. But Leone noted in a tweet that "you can just pay $1 instead," a likely reference to services that provide cheap, fake temporary phone numbers to get around these kinds of verification systems.

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Beware of bad science reporting: No, we haven’t killed 90% of all plankton

Enlarge / Plankton are under real threat as our oceans warm and acidify, but they're not all gone yet. (credit: tonaquatic/Getty Images)

For the past few days, it has been hard to look at social media without coming across a scary-looking report from the Scottish newspaper The Sunday Post. "Scots team’s research finds Atlantic plankton all but wiped out in catastrophic loss of life," reads the breathless headline. The article claims that a survey of plankton in the ocean found that "evidence... suggest[s] 90% has now vanished." The article then goes on to predict the imminent collapse of our biosphere.

There's just one problem: The article is utter rubbish.

The Sunday Post uses as its source a preprint manuscript—meaning it hasn't been peer-reviewed yet—from lead author Howard Dryden at the Global Oceanic Environmental Survey.

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Two companies join SpaceX in the race to Mars, with a launch possible in 2024

Enlarge / Here is a preliminary design of a Mars lander to be built by Impulse Space. (credit: Impulse Space)

Relativity Space has not launched a single rocket, and Impulse Space has never tested one of its thrusters in space. Nevertheless, on Tuesday, the two California-based companies declared their intention to launch an ambitious mission that will land on the surface of Mars in fewer than three years.

This would be the first-ever commercial mission to Mars, and normally such a claim could be safely dismissed as absurd. But this announcement—audacious though it may be—is probably worth taking seriously because of the companies and players involved.

Founded in 2015, Relativity has raised more than $1 billion and should launch its small Terran 1 rocket later this year. The company, which seeks to 3D print the majority of its vehicles, is already deep into development of the fully reusable Terran R rocket. This booster is intended to be somewhat more powerful than SpaceX's Falcon 9 and would carry the commercial mission to Mars. Relativity plans to have the Terran R rocket ready to launch in 2024, with the Mars payload flying on its debut mission in the late 2024 window to Mars.

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Catching up with Stranger Things S4 (yes, we have some feels)

Enlarge (credit: Netflix)

Stranger Things came back from a pandemic-driven three-year hiatus stronger than ever with an ambitious supersized fourth season—so much so that Netflix released it in two parts. Part 1 had a few minor flaws, particular in the earlier episodes, but quickly gained dramatic momentum. The cliffhanger ending deftly set the stage for the epic final two episodes, which featured a visually stunning, nail-biting battle against the denizens of the Upside Down—and some of the most emotionally resonant moments in the series to date.

(WARNING! Some very major spoilers below the galleries in the interest of in-depth analysis.)

Ratings-wise, this was the series' best season yet, drawing so many viewers when Part 2 dropped over Fourth of July weekend that Netflix actually crashed at one point. S4 Part 1 dominated the Nielsen streaming charts for four straight weeks, and that dominance is expected to continue once Nielsen releases its numbers for the two super-sized finale episodes. (There's usually about a month's delay for streaming platform viewership.) Part 1 also received 13 Emmy nominations. Seven years after it debuted, Stranger Things is more popular than ever, even launching two old 80s tunes back onto the charts after they were featured prominently this season.

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2022 Porsche 911 GT3 review: The superlative sports car

Enlarge / There are 911s, and then there are 911 GT3s. (credit: Bradley Iger)

Originally produced to satisfy homologation rules for FIA competition, the 911 GT3 has had an intrinsic connection to Porsche's racing efforts since the model debuted in 1999. With the introduction of the 992-generation GT3, the shared DNA is more evident than ever. Yet Porsche has somehow managed to strike a balance between capability and pragmatism, resulting in a performance machine that will mercilessly hunt down apices on a track while delivering an enjoyable driving experience outside a curated road course.

But don't think for a moment that the GT3 has gone soft. Developed alongside its racing counterparts by Porsche's GT division, the new car's sub-3,200 lb (1,451 kg) curb weight remains virtually unchanged from its predecessor despite the transition to the larger 992 platform thanks to a strong focus on reducing mass throughout the car. A new exhaust system saves 22 lbs (10 kg) here, a lithium iron phosphate battery shaves off a few pounds there—it all adds up. And that approach is a recurring theme in the 992 GT3.

New adjustable aerodynamic elements allow downforce to be increased by as much as 150 percent over the previous generation GT3 (known as the 991.2). And in a first for any road-going 911, the new GT3 adopts the 911 RSR racing car's double-wishbone front suspension configuration to enhance handling precision. According to GT division boss Andreas Preuninger, the design improves contact patch stability as the suspension absorbs bumps and other imperfections in the road surface, allowing Porsche engineers to stiffen the chassis while retaining ride compliance. New adaptive dampers, which can react to road conditions in roughly half the time, further aid that mission.

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A dying star’s last hurrah

Enlarge / The Butterfly Nebula, located just under 4,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius, is a striking example of a planetary nebula, the end stage in the evolution of a small- to medium-sized star. The butterfly’s diaphanous “wings” consist of gas and dust that have been expelled from the dying star and illuminated from within by the star’s remaining core. The nebula’s symmetrical, double-lobed shape is a telltale sign that a companion star helped shape the outflowing gases. Both the primary star and its companion are hidden by the shroud of dust in the nebula’s center. (credit: NASA , ESA , and J. Kastner (RIT))

Billions of years from now, as our Sun approaches the end of its life and helium nuclei begin to fuse in its core, it will bloat dramatically and turn into what’s known as a red giant star. After swallowing Mercury, Venus, and Earth with hardly a burp, it will grow so large that it can no longer hold onto its outermost layers of gas and dust.

In a glorious denouement, it will eject these layers into space to form a beautiful veil of light, which will glow like a neon sign for thousands of years before fading.

The galaxy is studded with thousands of these jewel-like memorials, known as planetary nebulae. They are the normal end stage for stars that range from half the Sun’s mass up to eight times its mass. (More massive stars have a much more violent end, an explosion called a supernova.) Planetary nebulae come in a stunning variety of shapes, as suggested by names like the Southern Crab, the Cat’s Eye, and the Butterfly. But as beautiful as they are, they have also been a riddle to astronomers. How does a cosmic butterfly emerge from the seemingly featureless, round cocoon of a red giant star?

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