Savor the sinister delights of del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities trailer

Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities is a new anthology series coming this month to Netflix.

So-called cabinets of curiosities—aka wunderkammers ("wonder-rooms")—were hugely popular in the 17th century. They were largely random collections of strange-yet-fascinating stuff, including natural history specimens, archaeological artifacts, religious or historical relics, the odd work of art, and any other quirky item that caught the cabinet creator’s fancy.  The concept also inspired auteur director Guillermo del Toro when putting together a new anthology horror series for Netflix: Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities. The streaming platform just dropped the official trailer for the series, and it looks like just the right kind of fright fare to bring some stylishly spooky frissons to the Halloween season.

As we've reported previously, the series was first announced in 2018 and features eight episodes written and directed by filmmakers handpicked by del Toro. The list of directors includes Jennifer Kent, who directed 2014's phenomenal The Babadook; her episode, "The Murmuring," is based on an original story by del Toro and features Babadook star Essie Davis (aka Miss Fisher). "Dreams in the Witch House," based on an H.P. Lovecraft short story, is directed by Catherine Hardwicke (Lords of Dogtown, Twilight).

"Graveyard Rats" is directed by Vincenzo Natali (In the Tall Grass, Splice), while Guillermo Navarro (Narcos) directed "Lot 36," also based on an original story by del Toro. Keith Thomas (Firestarter) directed "Pickman's Model," another episode based on a Lovecraft short story; David Prior (The Empty Man) directed "The Autopsy"; Panos Cosmatos (Mandy) directed "The Viewing"; and Ana Lily Amirpour—who directed the exquisite A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night—directed "The Outside."

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The best Mac desktop clients for Gmail aficionados

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images / Apple)

Here's the situation: I have a Mac, I need a desktop mail client, and I want it to work as seamlessly as possible with Gmail.

Just a small slice of Gmail's Vim-inspired keyboard shortcuts. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Gmail has been my primary personal email provider since 2003. I've also had more than a dozen Google Workspace accounts over the years. I understand the issues inherent in an advertising company managing my email and keeping me locked into its ecosystem. But I dig Gmail's Vim-inspired shortcuts, its powerful search capabilities, its advanced filtering, its storage—and, of course, its availability in nearly any browser.

But browsers are often where focus goes to flounder. I want to give email a defined space, a visual context as a place I go to communicate. And, incidentally, I want to avoid Gmail's annoying nudges to use Meet, Spaces, or whatever the messaging focus is this week. So let's see what kind of Mac desktop client works best for someone with Gmail on the brain.

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Mystery hackers are “hyperjacking” targets for insidious spying

Enlarge (credit: Marco Rosario Venturini Autieri/Getty Images)

For decades, virtualization software has offered a way to vastly multiply computers’ efficiency, hosting entire collections of computers as “virtual machines” on just one physical machine. And for almost as long, security researchers have warned about the potential dark side of that technology: theoretical “hyperjacking” and “Blue Pill” attacks, where hackers hijack virtualization to spy on and manipulate virtual machines, with potentially no way for a targeted computer to detect the intrusion. That insidious spying has finally jumped from research papers to reality with warnings that one mysterious team of hackers has carried out a spree of “hyperjacking” attacks in the wild.

Today, Google-owned security firm Mandiant and virtualization firm VMware jointly published warnings that a sophisticated hacker group has been installing backdoors in VMware’s virtualization software on multiple targets’ networks as part of an apparent espionage campaign. By planting their own code in victims’ so-called hypervisors—VMware software that runs on a physical computer to manage all the virtual machines it hosts—the hackers were able to invisibly watch and run commands on the computers those hypervisors oversee. And because the malicious code targets the hypervisor on the physical machine rather than the victim’s virtual machines, the hackers’ trick multiplies their access and evades nearly all traditional security measures designed to monitor those target machines for signs of foul play.

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FDA’s rotten definition of “healthy” food is finally getting tossed

Enlarge (credit: Getty | REDA&CO)

The US Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday proposed a long-awaited revision to the definition of the term "healthy" on food packaging—finally scrapping the mind-boggling criteria from the 1990s that made healthful foods such as nuts, salmon, avocados, olive oil, and even water ineligible for the label.

The new definition is not immune to criticism, and Americans are likely to still face uncertainty about healthy food choices as they stroll grocery store aisles. But, the proposed update—which coincides with this week's White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health and a national strategy to improve US nutrition and reduce hunger—is a clear improvement.

Under the current criteria, established in 1994, the FDA allows food manufacturers to label their products as "healthy" based on myopic maximums and minimums of specific nutrients. That means "healthy" foods have universal maximums for saturated fat, total fat, cholesterol, and sodium, and are also required to provide at least 10 percent of the daily value for one or more of the following nutrients: vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, iron, protein, and fiber.

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NASA and SpaceX are studying a Hubble telescope boost, adding 15 to 20 years of life

Enlarge / The crew of Polaris Dawn, from left: Scott Poteet, Jared Isaacman, Sarah Gillis, and Anna Menon, pose in front of SpaceX's Super Heavy rocket in South Texas. (credit: John Kraus/Polaris Program)

NASA announced Thursday that it plans to study the possibility of using SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle to boost the aging Hubble Space Telescope into a higher orbit.

The federal agency has signed a "Space Act Agreement" with SpaceX to conduct a six-month study to determine the practicability of Dragon docking with the 32-year-old telescope and boosting it into a higher orbit. The study is not exclusive, meaning that other companies can propose similar concepts with alternative rockets and spacecraft.

The agreement comes after SpaceX and the Polaris Program—a series of private missions self-funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman—approached NASA about potential servicing missions including the Hubble Space Telescope. Isaacman is the first private citizen to command an orbital spaceflight, when he led a crew of four aboard SpaceX's Dragon in 2021 on the Inspiration4 mission. With Polaris he is seeking to push the boundaries of private space exploration outward. The first Polaris mission is scheduled for March 2022 on Dragon, and will fly to an altitude of 750 km while also conducting the first private spacewalks.

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This underwater camera operates wirelessly without batteries

Enlarge / MIT engineers built a battery-free, wireless underwater camera that could help scientists explore unknown regions of the ocean, track pollution, or monitor the effects of climate change. (credit: Adam Glanzman)

MIT engineers have built a wireless, battery-free underwater camera, capable of harvesting energy by itself while consuming very little power, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications. The system can take color photos of remote submerged objects—even in dark settings— and convey the data wirelessly for real-time monitoring of underwater environments, aiding the discovery of new rare species or monitoring ocean currents, pollution, or commercial and military operations.

We already have various methods of taking underwater images, but according to the authors, "Most of the ocean and marine organisms have not been observed yet." That's partly because most existing methods require being tethered to ships, underwater drones, or power plants for both power and communication. Those methods that don't use tethering must incorporate battery power, which limits their lifetime. While it's possible in principle to harvest energy from ocean waves, underwater currents, or even sunlight, adding the necessary equipment to do so would result in a much bulkier and more expensive underwater camera.

So the MIT team set about developing a solution for a battery-free, wireless imaging method. The design goal was to minimize the hardware required as much as possible. Since they wanted to keep power consumption to a minimum,  for instance, the MIT team used cheap off-the-shelf imaging sensors. The trade-off is that such sensors only produce grayscale images. The team also needed to develop a low-power flash as well, since most underwater environments don't get much natural light.

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Numerous orgs hacked after installing weaponized open source apps

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Hackers backed by the North Korean government are weaponizing well-known pieces of open source software in an ongoing campaign that has already succeeded in compromising "numerous" organizations in the media, defense and aerospace, and IT services industries, Microsoft said on Thursday.

ZINC—Microsoft's name for a threat actor group also called Lazarus, which is best known for conducting the devastating 2014 compromise of Sony Pictures Entertainment—has been lacing PuTTY and other legitimate open source applications with highly encrypted code that ultimately installs espionage malware.

The hackers then pose as job recruiters and connect with individuals of targeted organizations over LinkedIn. After developing a level of trust over a series of conversations and eventually moving them to the WhatsApp messenger, the hackers instruct the individuals to install the apps, which infect the employees' work environments.

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Meta announces Make-A-Video, which generates video from text

Enlarge / Still image from an AI-generated video of a teddy bear painting a portrait. (credit: Meta)

Today, Meta announced Make-A-Video, an AI-powered video generator that can create novel video content from text or image prompts, similar to existing image synthesis tools like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. It can also make variations of existing videos, though it's not yet available for public use.

On Make-A-Video's announcement page, Meta shows example videos generated from text, including "a young couple walking in heavy rain" and "a teddy bear painting a portrait." It also showcases Make-A-Video's ability to take a static source image and animate it. For example, a still photo of a sea turtle, once processed through the AI model, can appear to be swimming.

The key technology behind Make-A-Video—and why it has arrived sooner than some experts anticipated—is that it builds off existing work with text-to-image synthesis used with image generators like OpenAI's DALL-E. In July, Meta announced its own text-to-image AI model called Make-A-Scene.

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Microsoft will end support for its SwiftKey iOS keyboard on October 5

Enlarge / Microsoft's SwiftKey keyboard for iOS is fading away next month. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft will discontinue its SwiftKey software keyboard for iOS and delist it from the App Store, according to a statement made to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley when asked about the future of the software.

"As of October 5, support for SwiftKey iOS will end and it will be delisted from the Apple App Store," said Chris Wolfe, SwiftKey's director of product management. "Microsoft will continue support for SwiftKey Android as well as the underlying technology that powers the Windows touch keyboard. For those customers who have SwiftKey installed on iOS, it will continue to work until it is manually uninstalled or a user gets a new device."

The iOS version of SwiftKey was last updated in August of 2021. Most updates in the year leading up to that were of the nondescript "bug fixes and performance improvements" variety. Microsoft purchased SwiftKey in 2016 for a reported $250 million, both for its iOS and Android software keyboards and their underlying technology.

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Juno just raced by Europa, providing our best look in 20 years at the icy world

Enlarge / The best images we have of Europa were gathered more than two decades ago. (credit: NASA)

On Thursday morning, NASA's Juno spacecraft swooped down to within 358 km of the surface of Europa, the large, ice-encrusted Moon that orbits Jupiter.

This flyby will provide humanity its closest look at Europa since the Galileo mission made several close flybys more than two decades ago. However, the Juno spacecraft will carry a more powerful suite of instruments and a far more capable camera than Galileo. So this should be our best look yet at the intriguing world.

Launched in 2011, Juno reached Jupiter in 2016 to closely study the composition of the Solar System's largest planet, as well as its powerful magnetosphere. After it successfully completed its primary mission in 2021, Juno's mission operators have begun using the probe to assess moons in the Jovian system, including Europa, Ganymede, and Io.

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Solar + batteries at home can provide backup power during disasters

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Lights went out as Hurricane Fiona devastated areas from the Caribbean to Canada, and Hurricane Ian has done the same. Hurricanes, along with other natural disasters like wildfires and winter storms, can leave people without access to electricity.

However, new research out of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests that added solar capacity, paired with batteries, can help address this problem. The study makes use of historic long-term power outages (caused by disasters) and models the performance of behind-the-meter solar and energy storage systems functioning as a kind of backup source of power during long-term power interruptions.

Behind-the-meter refers to solar systems that are installed on a customer’s residence—on the customer side of the electricity meter. The more common term for this is “roof-top solar,” according to Galen Barbose, research scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and one of the paper’s authors. “It’s more customer-sided solar,” he told Ars.

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How hobbyist hackers are preserving Pokémon’s past—and shaping its future

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Earlier this year, Pokémon Legends: Arceus reinvigorated developer Game Freak’s iconic series by shaking up a formula that had gone largely unchanged for more than 25 years. But that recent bout of experimentation doesn’t diminish just how long the Poké-formula has remained mostly static. For two and a half decades, the developer essentially released the same game over and over, and fans like me ate it up like pulled Lechonk. Perhaps disappointingly, the series appears to be resuming its usual course with the more traditional Scarlet & Violet launch this November.

Whether Legends will form an enduring and fresh new branch on Pokémon’s franchise tree is the kind of philosophical quandary that could make Xatu spend all day staring at the sun.

But for those who look beyond Nintendo’s official releases, the Pokémon series is anything but stale. While Nintendo, the games' publisher, hasn't worked to make older Pokémon games accessible on modern hardware—or affordable on older gear—a certain demographic of dedicated fans has taken it upon themselves to not just preserve legacy Pokémon titles but to actively improve them. These volunteer ROM hackers and preservationists work to keep the passions of an aging generation of Pokémon masters alive, all while fighting occasionally brutal legal crackdowns from Nintendo.

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Never-before-seen malware has infected hundreds of Linux and Windows devices

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Researchers have revealed a never-before-seen piece of cross-platform malware that has infected a wide range of Linux and Windows devices, including small office routers, FreeBSD boxes, and large enterprise servers.

Black Lotus Labs, the research arm of security firm Lumen, is calling the malware Chaos, a word that repeatedly appears in function names, certificates, and file names it uses. Chaos emerged no later than April 16, when the first cluster of control servers went live in the wild. From June through mid-July, researchers found hundreds of unique IP addresses representing compromised Chaos devices. Staging servers used to infect new devices have mushroomed in recent months, growing from 39 in May to 93 in August. As of Tuesday, the number reached 111.

Black Lotus has observed interactions with these staging servers from both embedded Linux devices as well as enterprise servers, including one in Europe that was hosting an instance of GitLab. There are more than 100 unique samples in the wild.

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Grand Canyon’s explosive gastroenteritis was a 3-month, multisource outbreak

Enlarge / The Grand Canyon viewed from the South Rim adjacent to the El Tovar Hotel on November 11, 2019, in Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona. (credit: Getty | George Rose)

The explosive outbreak of gastroenteritis that erupted in the Grand Canyon earlier this year was likely sparked by multiple people hauling in norovirus infections, according to a recent study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The infectious blast ended up violently hollowing out of at least 222 visitors to the geologic marvel over a brisk, but brutal three-month period

As Ars readers may recall, the National Park Service issued warnings early in the summer that an outbreak was gutting river rafters and hikers. But the new study, led by local and CDC officials, offers a more detailed look at the outbreak that left outdoor adventurers grasping the rims of basins much smaller than that of the Colorado River.

The trouble appears to have begun in early April, with the first identified case striking a backpacker on April 4. On April 8, a commercial rafting company notified the National Park's Office of Public Health (OPH) that seven people on a rafting trip fell ill with vomiting and/or diarrhea. The cases kept streaming in through April and erupted in early May. The OPH contacted the CDC on May 11, after collecting dozens of case reports. By May 21, the OPH received reports of an additional 102 cases from 13 river rafting groups and several backpackers.

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No, minors can’t just “opt out” of Destiny 2’s anti-cheating provisions

Enlarge / I'm not 18 yet, so I can do whatever I want here... right?

A serial Destiny 2 cheater currently facing a lawsuit from Bungie is arguing in court that his status as a minor means he can effectively opt out of the game's license agreement, including any anti-cheating provisions he may have violated. Ironically, though, trying to make use of this loophole may have opened the defendant up to much more serious copyright infringement claims.

In a motion to dismiss filed earlier this month (as noted by TorrentFreak), the plaintiff in the cheating case (referred to in court documents as L.L. to protect his real identity) argues that he is not subject to Bungie's Limited Software License Agreement (LSLA). That's because, as a minor, L.L. has the right to "disaffirm" that contract, which means it is "legally treated as if it was never formed." L.L. did just that on September 8, filing documents disaffirming "any and all contracts between himself and Bungie."

In his motion to dismiss, L.L. argues that this move means he is retroactively not subject to LSLA clauses that prevent players from "hack[ing] or modify[ing]" the game or "us[ing] any unauthorized software programs to gain advantage in any online or multiplayer game modes." Thus, Bungie's claims based on breach of that contract should be dismissed.

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Early renders show the Galaxy S23 ditching the camera bump

Enlarge / What do you think of the individual camera lenses? Minimal? Generic? (credit: OnLeaks and Digit.in)

The Galaxy S23 is probably five months away, but we now have some idea of what it will look like. The ever-reliable OnLeaks has a new set of renders for the device. These are usually based on the CAD files released to case and accessory manufacturers, so while some small details like the placement of logos might be off, the major components should be correct.

OnLeaks has a render of the base model S23, and the big news is that it's doing away with the camera bump. The S21 and S22 had a large raised block growing out of the corner, but this S23 render shows only three naked camera lenses popping out of the back. This design change would bring the base model (and presumably "Plus" model) phones in line with the S22 Ultra, which has a similar lens-only camera protrusion. The S22 Ultra's individual camera lenses looked great in person, but like any corner camera setup, the bump makes the phone unstable if it's lying on a flat surface.

The report has the phone at "roughly" 146.3×70.8×7.6 mm with a 6.1-inch display. It should come with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, 120 Hz display, and hopefully an upgrade for the tiny 3700 mAh battery the S22 shipped with this year.

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Serious vulnerabilities in Matrix’s end-to-end encryption are being patched

Enlarge (credit: matrix.org)

Developers of the open source Matrix messenger protocol are releasing an update on Thursday to fix critical end-to-end encryption vulnerabilities that subvert the confidentiality and authentication guarantees that have been key to the platform's meteoric rise.

Matrix is a sprawling ecosystem of open source and proprietary chat and collaboration clients and servers that are fully interoperable. The best-known app in this family is Element, a chat client for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android, but there's a dizzying array of other members as well.

(credit: Hodgson)

Matrix roughly aims to do for real-time communication what the SMTP standard does for email, which is to provide a federated protocol allowing user clients connected to different servers to exchange messages with each other. Unlike SMTP, however, Matrix offers robust end-to-end encryption, or E2EE, designed to ensure that messages can't be spoofed and that only the senders and receivers of messages can read the contents.

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Twitter says Elon Musk’s own data scientists did not back up bots claims

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Twitter has said Elon Musk’s own data scientists did not support his claim that the number of fake accounts on the social media platform is “wildly higher” than the company’s estimates, as the parties prepare to go to trial in October.

The Tesla chief executive is attempting to pull out of a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, arguing that it misled regulators and investors about the true number of fake and spam accounts on the platform, which he alleges far outstrips the 5 percent figure that Twitter has cited for years.

During a three-hour hearing in a Delaware court on Tuesday, Twitter’s lawyers said documents they had received during discovery showed that two different consultants hired by Musk, Cyabra and CounterAction, had produced estimates of the amount of spam on Twitter of 11 percent and 5 percent, respectively—figures broadly in line with Twitter’s public estimates.

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As a meteorologist, Hurricane Ian is the nightmare storm I worry about most

Enlarge / A satellite image of Hurricane Ian as of 7:50 am ET on Wednesday. (credit: NOAA)

I have lived near the Texas coast for two decades and written about hurricanes professionally for nearly as long. When you do that, you think a lot about what would become of your home should the worst happen.

Well, the worst is happening in Southwest Florida today.

Hurricane Ian has undergone a remarkable period of intensification during the last 24 hours. After crossing the western end of Cuba and knocking that island nation's power grid offline, Ian started to weaken a bit Tuesday following this brief interaction with land. It also underwent an "eyewall replacement cycle," in which the centermost bands of the storm contract and are replaced by a new ring of storms farther out. Often this process temporarily weakens a storm, but Ian was hardly fazed.

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Western forests, snowpack, and wildfires appear trapped in vicious climate cycle

Enlarge / On the last day of summer, fall colors contrast with the burnt landscape of the Cameron Peak Fire on Sept. 21, 2021, in Larimer County, Colorado. (credit: RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

When Stephanie Kampf visited one of her wildfire test plots near Colorado’s Joe Wright Reservoir in June of 2021, the charred remains of what had been a cool, shady spruce and fir forest before the Cameron Peak Fire incinerated it nearly took her breath away.

“We would walk through these burned areas and they were just black, nothing growing and already getting kind of hot,” she said. “And then you walk into an unburned patch, and there’d still be snow on the ground. You could almost breathe more.”

The surveys, up at about 10,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains west of Fort Collins, were part of a rapid response science assessment to measure just how much the extreme 2020 wildfire season in the West disrupted the water-snow cycle in the critical late-snowmelt zone that serves as a huge natural reservoir. The snowmelt sustains river flows that nurture ecosystems, fills irrigation ditches for crops, and delivers supplies of industrial and drinking water to communities.

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Logitech finally makes a wireless mechanical keyboard with a true Mac layout

Enlarge / Logitech's MX Mechanical for Mac has an Apple-friendly layout. (credit: Scharon Harding)

Logitech has Mac-ified its MX Mechanical Mini wireless keyboard. That is to say, it has created a version of the truncated keyboard for people who use Mac computers. The Logitech MX Mechanical Mini for Mac joins a small number of mechanical keyboards that are designed for macOS, from its use of Option and Command legends to software support and an Apple-like aesthetic. It's built for a cable-free setup and has pleasant typing but it's not a good fit for mechanical keyboard enthusiasts who like various switch options, premium keycaps, or high programmability... or numpads.

True Mac layout

Logitech released the MX Mechanical Mini, a 75 percent keyboard, alongside the full-size Logitech MX Mechanical in May. The portable Bluetooth LE keyboard can wirelessly connect to three devices, allowing users to pick which device they're controlling by pressing Fn and 1, 2, or 3. Officially, those devices can run Windows, macOS, ChromeOS, Linux, Android, iOS, or iPadOS. Because of that, key legends cater to both Windows and Mac users. The bottom row includes a key that can be Option or Start/Windows and one that serves as Command or Alt.

The MX Mechanical for Mac isn't so neutral. Its layout only includes Mac legends, making for a cleaner-looking bottom row than the original MX Mechanical Mini.

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Unusual Ebola strain kills 23 in Uganda; no vaccines, treatments available

Enlarge / Health measures are taken at Mubende Regional Referral Hospital after an outbreak of Ebola in Uganda. (credit: Getty | Anadolu Agency)

Health officials in Uganda are scrambling to catch up to a burgeoning Ebola outbreak caused by a lesser-seen Ebolavirus species called Sudan virus (SUDV), for which there is no vaccine or treatment.

Information so far suggests that the outbreak response efforts may be three weeks behind the initial spread of SUDV, which has an incubation period of up to 21 days and a case fatality rate between 41 percent and 100 percent. So far, 36 cases (18 confirmed, 18 probable) have been identified, with 23 deaths. Health officials have listed a total of 223 contacts.

But that number is likely an undercount. Several transmission chains have not been tracked, and some health facilities that saw Ebola patients did not follow optimal infection control measures, the World Health Organization warned. Further, because of the delayed recognition of the outbreak, some patients were buried in traditional ceremonies with large gatherings that could have allowed the virus to transmit further.

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Nreal’s $380 AR glasses want to be a virtual monitor for MacBooks

Enlarge / Nreal depicts someone using the Air glasses to extend their MacBook desktop. (credit: Nreal)

As augmented reality (AR) glasses continue to try carving a place among tech enthusiasts, we're seeing another option hit mass availability in the US. In addition to selling the sunglass-like Nreal Air specs in America, Beijing-based company Nreal also announced today a version of its Nebula AR operating system that will work with Apple M1 and M2-powered MacBooks.

The Mac version of Nebula works with MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops with Apple silicon and is launching as a beta. Attaching the Air glasses to a MacBook won't give you the same Nebula "AR Space" experience available to supported Android phones. AR Space includes a mixed-reality interface and games and other AR apps made for the glasses. Instead, Mac users will see a virtual UI that Nreal's calling AR Desktop and projects up to three virtual displays at a time, an Nreal rep told Ars Technica. An Nreal rep wouldn't specify when AR Space would come to MacBooks or iOS.

In a statement, Nreal co-founder Peng Jin said the company expects AR glasses to initially gain traction among consumers by serving as a display technology, so "the thinking behind Nreal Air is very focused on the aesthetics, display quality, and its connectivity with other hardware devices."

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Ian reaches major hurricane status, will be a historic storm for Florida

Enlarge / As of 5:50 am ET on Tuesday, Hurricane Ian had nearly traversed the island of Cuba. (credit: NOAA)

Hurricane Ian continued to intensify on Monday night and reached sustained winds of 125 mph as its center passed across the western edge of Cuba. From there, the storm will move into the southeastern Gulf of Mexico, where very warm water and low wind shear will allow for further intensification.

The hurricane has been moving around the western edge of a high pressure system, but as Ian approaches the western coast of Florida on Wednesday it will start to run into a trough of low pressure draped across the southeastern United States. The net effect of this will cause Ian to slow down, perhaps only moving a few miles per hour for a couple of days.

All of this is a recipe for disaster for much of the Florida peninsula, but it's difficult to say precisely where, and precisely which effects. Even though landfall is expected to occur in less than two days, there remains considerable uncertainty in where Ian will make landfall along the western Florida coast, and where it will go. This is due, in part, to the breakdown of its steering currents.

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DART goes silent after hitting an asteroid

Enlarge / One of the last images from DART. (credit: NASA/APL)

About 24 hours prior to its collision, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) probe performed its last course correction based on commands sent by ground controllers. "It's pointed to within a football field of the central body," said Bobby Braun of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL). "That last maneuver was spot-on."

Even at this late stage, DART's onboard camera couldn't resolve its ultimate target, the small asteroid Dimorphos, so the central body it was targeting is the partner Dimorphos orbits, called Didymos. DART's onboard navigation couldn't start navigating toward its target until it could see it, which was only expected to occur about 90 minutes before impact. At that point, the navigation started adjusting DART's course to get it heading straight at Dimorphos. Ground controllers, separated by about a minute of communications time, could only watch.

"Space is full of moments, and we're going to have a moment tonight, hopefully," said Braun.

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Experts debate the ethics of LinkedIn’s algorithm experiments on 20M users

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

This month, LinkedIn researchers revealed in Science that the company spent five years quietly researching more than 20 million users. By tweaking the professional networking platform's algorithm, researchers were trying to determine through A/B testing whether users end up with more job opportunities when they connect with known acquaintances or complete strangers.

To weigh the strength of connections between users as weak or strong, acquaintance or stranger, the researchers analyzed factors like the number of messages they sent back and forth or the number of mutual friends they shared, gauging how these factors changed over time after connecting on the social media platform. The researchers' discovery confirmed what they describe in the study as "one of the most influential social theories of the past century" about job mobility: The weaker the ties users have, the better the job mobility. While LinkedIn says these results will lead to changes in the algorithm to recommend more relevant connections to job searchers as "People You May Know" (PYMK) moving forward, The New York Times reported that ethics experts said the study "raised questions about industry transparency and research oversight."

Among experts' biggest concerns was that none of those millions of users LinkedIn analyzed were directly informed they were participating in the study—which "could have affected some people's livelihoods," NYT's report suggested.

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Asteroid Ryugu was once part of a much larger parent body, new results find

Enlarge / First spotted by astronomers in May 1999, Ryugu is essentially a large collection of loose rubble. (credit: JAXA)

The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 returned to Earth in December 2020 bearing soil samples collected from a nearby asteroid, 162173 Ryugu. Those samples were divided between six scientific teams around the world for cutting-edge analysis to determine their composition in hopes of learning more about how such bodies form. The results of the first year of analysis of those samples appeared in a new paper published in the journal Science and included the detection of a precious drop of water embedded in a crystal.

These findings suggest that Ryugu was once part of a much larger asteroid that formed out of various materials some two million years after our Solar System (some 4.5 billion years ago). Over the next three million years, the parent body's carbon dioxide ice melted, resulting in a water-rich interior and a drier surface. When another space rock hit the parent body about a billion years ago, it broke apart, and some of the resulting debris formed Ryugu. An accompanying computer simulation supports this formation history, backed by the results of the sample analyses.

First spotted by astronomers in May 1999, Ryugu is essentially a large collection of loose rubble. As much as 50 percent of its volume could be empty space. Like the asteroid Bennu, Ryugu is shaped a bit like a spinning top: a round shape with a sharp equatorial ridge. Its name derives from a Japanese folktale in which a fisherman travels to an underwater palace called Ryūgū-jō ("Dragon Palace") on the back of a turtle.

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Interpol issues red notice for crypto founder Do Kwon

Enlarge / Terra, the "algorithmic stablecoin" designed to stick close to the value of the US dollar, collapsed in May 2022, spurring a wider crypto sell-off. (credit: Getty Images)

Do Kwon, the cryptocurrency founder whose tanking Luna and "stablecoin" TerraUSD currencies ushered in a $300 billion crypto crash, is now sought by Interpol following arrest warrants issued earlier this month.

South Korean authorities issued warrants last week for Kwon and five others on September 14, alleging their work on Terraform Labs' crypto products violated the country's trading laws. All six were believed to be located in Singapore at the time. Singapore police believe Kwon is no longer there, according to media reports. Interpol issued a "red notice" recently, asking law enforcement agencies around the world to locate and hold Kwon.

Kwon tweeted three days after the South Korean warrant that he was "not 'on the run' or anything similar" and that he was "in full cooperation and we don't have anything to hide." But he hasn't tweeted publicly in more than a week since.

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NASA makes the call to protect its Artemis I mission from Hurricane Ian

Enlarge / The fully stacked Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft will roll back to the Vehicle Assembly Building on Monday night. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

After delaying a final decision for two days, NASA on Monday made the call to roll its massive Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The space agency took this precautionary step as the storm Ian intensified into a hurricane in the Caribbean Sea and remained on track to move into the southeastern Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday.

"Managers met Monday morning and made the decision based on the latest weather predictions associated with Hurricane Ian, after additional data gathered overnight did not show improving expected conditions for the Kennedy Space Center area," NASA said in a blog post. "The decision allows time for employees to address the needs of their families and protect the integrated rocket and spacecraft system."

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Darth Vader’s voice will be AI-generated from now on

Enlarge / As James Earl Jones retires, Darth Vader's voice will come courtesy of voice-cloning software called Respeecher. (credit: Lucasfilm / Benj Edwards)

During the creation of the Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series, James Earl Jones signed off on allowing Disney to replicate his vocal performance as Darth Vader in future projects using an AI voice-modeling tool called Respeecher, according to a Vanity Fair report published Friday.

Jones, who is 91, has voiced the iconic Star Wars villain for 45 years, starting with Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope in 1977 and concluding with a brief line of dialog in 2019's The Rise of Skywalker. "He had mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character,” said Matthew Wood, a supervising sound editor at Lucasfilm, during an interview with Vanity Fair. “So how do we move forward?”

The answer was Respeecher, a voice cloning product from a company in Ukraine that uses deep learning to model and replicate human voices in a way that is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. Previously, Lucasfilm had used Respeecher to clone Mark Hamill's voice for The Mandalorian, and the company thought the same technology would be ideal for a major appearance of Darth Vader that would require dozens of lines of dialog. Working from archival recordings of Jones, Respeecher created a voice model that could be "performed" vocally by another actor using the company's speech-to-speech technology.

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Elon Musk offers Iranians uncensored Internet access

Enlarge / The Starlink dish and router. (credit: Starlink)

Elon Musk’s Starlink has activated its satellite broadband service in Iran after the US allowed private companies to offer uncensored Internet access to the country amid protests that have caused more than 40 deaths.

The open Internet access follows Starlink’s activation in Ukraine earlier this year as that country’s communication networks were disrupted by Russia’s invasion.

Starlink is the first in a new generation of satellite networks operating in low Earth orbit that are designed to provide high-bandwidth Internet connections from space directly to individual users. Starlink users are able to bypass a country’s terrestrial communications networks, freeing them from Internet censorship.

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Everything you need to know about Zen 4, socket AM5, and AMD’s newest chipsets

Enlarge (credit: AMD)

AMD's Ryzen 7000 launch is bigger than just the processors. The processor architecture is changing, but it's also being accompanied by changes to everything from the chipset to the physical socket that the chips plug into. The last time this many things changed at once was back in 2017, when the first-generation Ryzen chips originally launched.

So we're publishing two Ryzen pieces today. One is a look at the actual chips' performance and power efficiency, located here. This one will focus on all the other changes, including the ones that will be with us long after Ryzen 7000 is old news.

We'll split this piece up into four parts that cover the four major components of the Ryzen 7000 launch: 1) the Zen 4 CPU core, 2) the on-chip I/O die that supports the CPU's non-CPU features and handles internal connectivity, 3) the 600-series chipsets that handle most external connectivity, and 4) the physical AM5 socket that will outlive all of the other components by a few years.

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Were your teen years exhausting? School schedules may be why

Enlarge (credit: Jetta Productions)

If you went to high school in the US, you may recall early morning extracurriculars, sleeping through first period algebra, or bleary-eyed late-night study sessions (as opposed to other wide-awake “study sessions” we told our parents we were having). As an adult, you might wonder if there’s a better time to explore Shakespeare than at 8 am, or expand a Taylor series right after you collapsed into your chair, half-asleep from your sunrise bus ride.

As it turns out, early school start times for US high schools are built on a shaky scientific foundation, as journalist and parent Lisa Lewis lays out in her new book, The Sleep-Deprived Teen. She details why high schools in the US tend to start early, the science behind why that’s bad for kids, and how later school start times can benefit not only teenagers, but, well… everyone. Perhaps most importantly, she provides a primer on advocating for change in your community.

The wheels on the bus go round and round

Our early start times are a bit of a historical accident. In the first half of the 20th century, schools tended to be small and local—most students could walk. Lewis points out that in 1950, there were still 60,000 one-room schoolhouses around the country. By 1960, that number had dwindled to around 20,000.

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iOS 16 review: Customization unlocked

Enlarge / The (customized) lock screen in iOS 16. (credit: Samuel Axon)

For the past couple of years, Apple’s annual iOS updates have laser focused on one feature for an overhaul while making smaller tweaks to everything else. Last year, Focus was the, well, focus. The year before that, it was the home screen.

This time it’s the lock screen. You can now change fonts, add widgets, customize the information displayed, and pick from a wider variety of wallpaper. Apple has also more deeply integrated the lock screen with the Focus modes that were fleshed out in iOS 15. And it has laid the groundwork for something more than just notifications that third-party apps can show you before you unlock your phone.

Given the increasingly iterative nature of iOS releases today—with many key features not arriving until months after the initial ship date of a new, whole-numbered version—we’re moving to leaner initial iOS reviews, with updates to come in additional articles over time. So today we’re going to look at the main new feature of iOS 16, but we’ll touch on a couple of other key features and changes, too.

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Music on the brain: Listening can influence our brain’s activity

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People have long tried to use music as a tool to improve their abilities. Soldiers chanted songs when marching into battle, sailors sang songs on long voyages, and cloth makers sang when weaving. But do we have any evidence that music makes a difference for any of our activities?

We’ve only recently started to ask that question scientifically. It began with the Mozart effect, which seemed to link classical music to improved mental performance. Named after the famous composer, it was shorthand for the apparent boost in IQ tests that people listening to his music experienced. But the phenomenon turned out not to be real. “Background music was thought to help with work. [It was] found to be the noise stopping the person from being distracted,” says Professor Concetta Tomaino, executive director and co-founder of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function.

However, research into music and its effects on human abilities continued and eventually resulted in the discovery of an effect called brain entrainment, which appears capable of improving memory, focus, sleep, and physical activity.

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GeForce GPUs are slowing down after installing the Windows 11 2022 Update

Enlarge / The GeForce 3080 Ti. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Some users of Nvidia's GeForce graphics cards are noticing severe performance issues after installing the Windows 11 2022 Update (aka Windows 11 22H2) that Microsoft released to the public earlier this week. As reported by Bleeping Computer, affected users have experience stuttering, inconsistent framerates, and slowdowns, even on fast PCs with modern components.

Nvidia says the problem is caused by some new Windows graphics debugging features that are enabled by mistake.

The company publicly acknowledged the issue and released a new beta version of the GeForce Experience software package that it says should fix it. This implies that the problem is with Nvidia's add-on software rather than the GeForce drivers themselves; if you installed the drivers without the GeForce Experience software, you may not have noticed the slowdown in the first place.

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Starlink is getting a lot slower as more people use it, speed tests show

Enlarge (credit: Starlink)

Starlink's median download speeds in the US dropped from 90.6Mbps to 62.5Mbps between the first and second quarters of 2022, according to Ookla speed tests. Starlink's median upload speeds in the US dropped from 9.3Mbps to 7.2Mbps in the same timeframe.

Median latency also got a little worse for Starlink's US customers, rising from 43 ms to 48 ms. The latest numbers are in Ooka's Q2 2022 report on Starlink speeds around the world, released Tuesday. "Starlink speeds decreased in every country we surveyed over the past year as more users sign up for service," this week's report said. The Q1 report is available here.

The Q2 report notes significant year-over-year decreases in Starlink speeds in numerous countries, while pointing out that overall performance is still pretty good:

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Google will start assimilating Fitbit accounts next year

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Google's acquisition of Fitbit closed in early 2021, but we haven't seen much in the way of changes yet. 9to5Google spotted a big upcoming change posted on Fitbit's help site: account migrations! A new Fitbit help page has outlined the plan for the coming Google account migration. If this goes anything like the Nest account migrations (done by the same Google Hardware division), Fitbit users are in for a wild ride.

Google's support page says, "We plan to enable use of Fitbit with a Google account sometime in 2023" and that at that point "some uses of Fitbit will require a Google account, including to sign up for Fitbit or activate newly released Fitbit devices and features." That means optional account migrations for existing users in 2023. Google also says, "Support of Fitbit accounts will continue until at least early 2025. After support of Fitbit accounts ends, a Google account will be required to use Fitbit. We'll be transparent with our customers about the timeline for ending Fitbit accounts through notices within the Fitbit app, by email, and in help articles."

The merging of accounts will, of course, mean that Google gets your health data. Google says that "you’ll need to consent to transfer your Fitbit user data from Fitbit to Google" and that "Google will then provide you with Fitbit under Google’s Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and binding commitments for Fitbit." Part of those EU commitments, which Google chose to apply to the whole world, is that "Google will not use Fitbit health and wellness data for Google Ads."

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So long slowdown: New hack runs SNES Star Fox at up to 60 fps

A demonstration of the hacked, 60 fps version of Star Fox released this week (though this demo doesn't get much above 30 fps, as noted in the bottom-left corner).

If you were a Nintendo kid in the '90s, you were probably blown away by how Star Fox and its SuperFX chip could render full 3D worlds on 1993-era SNES hardware. If you go back to play the game today, though, you'll probably be let down by the game's choppy frame rate, which maxes out at a halting 20 fps.

Enter longtime Star Fox ROM hacker kandowontu, who's responsible for the feature-packed Star Fox Exploration Showcase hack. This week, kando released a patch that unlocks 30 or even 60 fps modes in an emulated Star Fox (or Star Fox 2em) ROM. The result is an extremely smooth experience that probably comes closer to matching the rose-colored memories you have of early '90s Star Fox than the original game ever could.

A problem of design

Attempts to speed up Star Fox are nothing new in the hacking and emulation communities. For years players have overclocked SuperFX chips or run emulators at higher speeds to try to up the game's frame rate.

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A history of ARM, part 1: Building the first chip

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

It was 1983, and Acorn Computers was on top of the world. Unfortunately, trouble was just around the corner.

The small UK company was famous for winning a contract with the British Broadcasting Corporation to produce a computer for a national television show. Sales of its BBC Micro were skyrocketing and on pace to exceed 1.2 million units.

A magazine ad for the BBC Micro. The tagline was "The Shape of Things to Come."

But the world of personal computers was changing. The market for cheap 8-bit micros that parents would buy to help kids with their homework was becoming saturated. And new machines from across the pond, like the IBM PC and the upcoming Apple Macintosh, promised significantly more power and ease of use. Acorn needed a way to compete, but it didn’t have much money for research and development.

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Impressions: Shovel Knight Dig is my new roguelite gaming addiction

Enlarge / Dig deeply enough in Shovel Knight Dig, and you'll find trippy treasure just like this. (credit: Yacht Club Games)

Shovel Knight Dig has been on our radar since its announcement in 2019—back when games could be revealed and immediately demonstrated at physical gaming expos. That many years ago, Dig was one of a few planned series spinoffs, and its demo at that year's PAX West show floor filled me with dungeon-digging excitement.

This week, the series' third formal spinoff finally goes on sale on PC, iOS, and Nintendo Switch, and in great news, Dig is easily the best Shovel Knight offshoot yet. What's more, it stands out compared to other arcadey, action-focused roguelites, and the result feels like a depth-filled mod for the mobile classic Downwell.

A new pit stop on the randomly generated road

Lots of silly chatter surrounds a new massive chasm in this otherwise peaceful village. (credit: Yacht Club Games)

Shovel Knight has reasons to dig with his namesake weapon in search of treasure, secrets, and revenge. If you're interested in this character-filled story, Dig's interactions with beautifully drawn and animated animals are as charming as the plot found in the mainline series' four campaigns. Or you can mash buttons to skip the dialogue and get to the satisfying digging.

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  Shovel Knight can dig left, right, and downward, but never upward. If you mash the dig button, he'll keep going, even if there's no ground beneath his feet to support his weight—and you'll need to abuse this clever, Looney Tunes-esque mechanic to survive certain tricky races against time.

Control in this new 2D side-scrolling game resembles the mainline series, as well: Use an action button to swipe your shovel left or right (or downward if you hold down on the D-pad) while your hero lands from jumps and falls with his shovel facing downward, which not only harms vulnerable foes but also makes the Knight bounce upward off most stuff it contacts, except certain ground types. Instead of running left or right to a goal, Shovel Knight now digs downward through randomly generated levels (with a few left and right exceptions, usually found in the game's wealth of hidden challenges).

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The case of the murdered mummies: “virtual autopsy” reveals fatal injuries

Enlarge / Face and upper body of one of two South American mummies that were likely murdered, based on a recent "virtual autopsy." (credit: A-M Begerock et al., 2022)

An international team of scientists used CT scanning to conduct "virtual autopsies" of three South American mummies and found evidence of fatal trauma in two of them, according to a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine. One of the mummies had clearly been hit on the head and stabbed, possibly by two assailants, while the other showed signs of massive cervical spine trauma. The third female mummy also showed signs of trauma, but the damage was inflicted post-mortem. The study is part of ongoing efforts to determine the frequency of violence in prehistoric human societies.

According to the authors, there is a large database of ancient Egyptian mummies and skeletons that show signs of having suffered a traumatic injury, but there is far less data for South American mummies, many of which formed naturally and are exceptionally well-preserved. Nonetheless, evidence of fatal trauma has been reported previously in a few cases, such as a pre-Columbian skull from the Nasca region showing rational trauma to the cervical spine and accompanying soft tissue bleeding into the skull. An almost complete female mummy showed signs of facial bone fractures consistent with massive strikes from a weapon, as did the skull of a mummified male infant.

An extensive 1993 survey used conventional X-rays to analyze 63 mummies and mummy fragments, 11 of which showed signs of trauma to the skull. But those mummies came from different locations, populations, and time periods, making it difficult to draw general conclusions from the findings. Last year, researchers looked for signs of violence in the remains of 194 adults buried between 2,800 and 1,400 years ago in the Atacama desert of northern Chile, 40 of which appeared to have been the victims of brutal violence.

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Hunga Tonga eruption put over 50B kilograms of water into the stratosphere

Enlarge / The Hunga Tonga eruption started under water, yet still blasted straight through much of the atmosphere. (credit: NASA)

In January this year, an undersea volcano in Tonga produced a massive eruption, the largest so far this century. The mixing of hot volcanic material and cool ocean water created an explosion that sent an atmospheric shockwave across the planet and triggered a tsunami that devastated local communities and reached as far as Japan. The only part of the crater's rim that extended above water was reduced in size and separated into two islands. A plume of material was blasted straight through the stratosphere and into the mesosphere, over 50 km above the Earth's surface.

We've taken a good look at a number of past volcanic eruptions and studied how they influence the climate. But those eruptions (most notably that of Mount Pinatubo) all came from volcanoes on land. Hunga Tonga may be the largest eruption we've ever documented that took place under water, and the eruption plume contained unusual amounts of water vapor—so much of it that it actually got in the way of satellite observations at some wavelengths. Now, researchers have used weather balloon data to reconstruct the plume and follow its progress during two circuits around the globe.

Boom meets balloon

Your vocabulary word of the day is radiosonde, which is a small instrument package and transmitter that can be carried into the atmosphere by a weather balloon. There are networks of sites where radiosondes are launched as part of weather forecasting services; the most relevant ones for Hunga Tonga are in Fiji and Eastern Australia. A balloon from Fiji was the first to take instruments into the eruption plume, doing so less than 24 hours after Hunga Tonga exploded.

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Tesla issues recall for 1.1 million EVs due to power window problem

Enlarge / Tesla has had to issue its largest-ever recall. (credit: Tesla)

On Thursday, Tesla issued a recall for almost 1.1 million vehicles due to a problem with their windows. The problem is related to the windows' automatic reversal function, the safety feature that lowers the glass if it's being raised and encounters part of a human being.

Unfortunately for the affected Teslas, during conformity production testing, "Tesla technicians identified window automatic reversal system performance that had greater than expected variations in response to pinch detection."

The problem affects Model 3s built between 2017 and 2022, Model Ys built between 2020 and 2021, and Models S and X built between 2021 and 2022. Tesla identified the problem in late August, and by September 12, after analyzing and validating its test results, the company made the decision to issue the recall.

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Florida to Supreme Court: Let us regulate social networks as common carriers

Enlarge / The US Supreme Court building. (credit: Getty Images | Rudy Sulgan)

Florida yesterday asked the US Supreme Court to reinstate its social media regulation law that made it illegal for sites like Facebook and Twitter to ban politicians.

Florida's petition said the Supreme Court should answer the questions of whether the First Amendment prohibits states "from requiring that social-media companies host third-party communications, and from regulating the time, place, and manner in which they do so," and whether the First Amendment prohibits states "from requiring social-media companies to notify and provide an explanation to their users when they censor the user's speech."

The Florida law is currently blocked by an order issued by the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which made its ruling in a lawsuit filed by Big Tech industry groups. Florida filed its Supreme Court petition several days after a Texas social media law was reinstated by the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

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New tech can make your house a solar microgrid

Enlarge / Modern single storey house with solar panels and wall battery for energy storage. (credit: imaginima)

In 2020, the average United States resident experienced a little more than eight hours of electricity blackouts, according to stats from the Energy Information Administration. The report noted that this was the highest number seen since 2013 when the organization began collecting this data.

During huge storms or massive oppressive heatwaves, the power can go out, and many of the amenities—TV, the Internet, fridges, etc.—Americans enjoy simply go kaput. Currently, the primary options for avoiding this fate are batteries and backup generators. However, a company called Enphase says it has created a product that can let your house run directly off its solar panels if they're producing, though it comes with some caveats.

Shouldn't solar panels work during an outage?

You'd think so, but no—mostly. Solar panels affixed to homes (and other structures) that are connected to the power grid will also go kaput during power outages. The outage doesn't stop them from producing power; the power just can't be used in the absence of a functioning grid. That's because the microinverters are part of an integrated system that includes the grid, power meter, and other associated hardware.

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