Musk to cut half of Twitter jobs and end remote work for the rest, report says

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Elon Musk plans to eliminate half the jobs at Twitter and require remote employees to report to an office, Bloomberg reported.

"Elon Musk plans to eliminate about 3,700 jobs at Twitter, or half of the social media company's workforce," and "intends to reverse the company's existing work-from-anywhere policy, asking remaining employees to report to offices—though some exceptions could be made," the report said. Bloomberg cited people with knowledge of the matter. Musk reportedly aims to inform affected staffers of the layoffs on Friday.

After an earlier report that Musk told investors he plans to cut 75 percent of Twitter's workforce, Musk reportedly told staff that he wouldn't eliminate 75 percent of the jobs. But it was still clear there would be a significant amount of layoffs.

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Why Egypt became one of the biggest chokepoints for Internet cables

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The Asia-Africa-Europe-1 Internet cable travels 15,500 miles along the seafloor, connecting Hong Kong to Marseille, France. As it snakes through the South China Sea and toward Europe, the cable helps provide Internet connections to more than a dozen countries, from India to Greece. When the cable was cut on June 7, millions of people were plunged offline and faced temporary Internet blackouts.

The cable, also known as AAE-1, was severed where it briefly passes across land through Egypt. One other cable was also damaged in the incident, with the cause of the damage unknown. However, the impact was immediate. “It affected about seven countries and a number of over-the-top services,” says Rosalind Thomas, the managing director of SAEx International Management, which plans to create a new undersea cable connecting Africa, Asia, and the US. “The worst was Ethiopia, that lost 90 percent of its connectivity, and Somalia thereafter also 85 percent.” Cloud services belonging to Google, Amazon, and Microsoft were all also disrupted, subsequent analysis revealed.

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Falling Chinese rocket expected to enter Earth’s atmosphere in

Enlarge / Possible Long March 5B reentry locations lie anywhere along the blue and yellow ground track. Areas not under the line are not exposed to the debris. (credit: The Aerospace Corporation)

The Chinese rocket that will fall back to Earth in a few days is equivalent in size to two semi-truck trailers, and as much as 40 percent of this metal will reach the Earth's surface, experts say.

Although the overall risk of harm to people is low—there is only a 0.5 percent chance of injury or death to a human, based on one model—these risks are nonetheless higher than accepted by most spacefaring nations, said Ted Muelhaupt, a reentry and debris expert at The Aerospace Corporation.

Muelhaupt and other analysts spoke with reporters during a teleconference Wednesday, about two days before the predicted reentry of the Long March 5B core stage. As it acquires more orbital data, the nonprofit Aerospace Corporation plans to continue updating its entry forecast. As of Thursday morning, it predicted a reentry of 7:17pm ET Friday (23:17 UTC), plus or minus 10 hours.

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$550 PlayStation VR2 launches on Feb. 22, 2023

Enlarge / Say so long to the original PSVR's glowing blue lights. (credit: PlayStation Blog)

Sony's PlayStation VR2 headset will cost $550 in the US when it launches on February 22, 2023, almost exactly two years after the headset was first announced.

The $550 package will come bundled with two tracked, handheld "PS VR2 Sense" controllers and stereo headphones, Sony announced in a blog post Wednesday morning. A $600 bundle will include the VR-exclusive Horizon Call of the Mountain.

On the surface, $550 seems like a sizable increase over the $400 asking price for the original PlayStation VR back in late 2016. But that comparison is a bit misleading. First, $400 in October of 2016 is worth the same as about $490 in today's dollars when accounting for inflation. Second, the original PlayStation VR required a tracking camera and two PlayStation Move controllers to control many games.

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NASCAR driver stuns racing world with a move learned from Nintendo GameCube

Enlarge / In a stunning Photoshop move, a Nintendo GameCube pulls ahead of the pack. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

On Sunday, NASCAR driver Ross Chastain made history with an unprecedented wall-riding maneuver that qualified him for a championship race and set the record for the fastest lap on the track at 18.845 seconds. Remarkably, Chastain said he learned the move playing NASCAR 2005 on the Nintendo GameCube when he was a kid.

The maneuver happened at the Xfinity 500 race hosted at Martinsville Speedway in Ridgeway, Virginia. Martinsville is a half-mile short track built in 1947 that is well known for its tight, shallow-banked turns that usually require heavy braking to negotiate.

During the final lap of the race, Chastain found himself in 10th place but needed to pick up two positions to earn enough points to qualify for the Championship race on November 6. Instead of slowing down on the turn, Chastain stayed in fifth gear and gunned it, riding the outside wall and passing five cars to finish the race in fith place.

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Sorry, prey. Black widows have surprisingly good memory

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Black widows must despise Clint Sergi. While working on his Ph.D. in biology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Sergi spent his time designing little challenges for spiders—which often involved rewarding them with tasty dead crickets or confounding them by stealing the crickets away. “The big question that motivated the work was just wanting to know what is going on inside the minds of animals,” he says.

Biologists already know spider brains aren’t like human brains. Their sensory world is geared for life in webs and dark corners. “Humans are very visual animals,” says Sergi. “These web-building spiders have almost no vision. They have eyes, but they're mostly good for sensing light and motion.” Instead, he says, a black widow’s perception comes mainly from vibrations, kind of like hearing. “Their legs are sort of like ears that pick up the vibrations through the web.”

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SpaceX successfully launches its first Falcon Heavy in 40 months

Enlarge / The Falcon Heavy rocket as seen at an altitude of about 160 meters on Tuesday, climbing above the fog but disappearing into haze. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

A dense fog shrouded much of Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday morning, largely obscuring the liftoff of the most powerful operational rocket in the world.

But takeoff the Falcon Heavy did, promptly at 9:41 am ET, climbing steadily above the Florida coast on its way to orbit. A few minutes into the launch, two side-mounted boosters—slightly modified versions of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket—peeled away from the center core of the rocket.

As that center core continued to climb toward orbit, the boosters fell back to Earth, burning a subset of their nine engines twice and making a picture-perfect side-by-side landing just a few kilometers away from where they launched from. SpaceX will now refurbish these side boosters for reuse on the military's next Falcon Heavy mission, USSF-67, in January. The center core was not recovered.

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