Private party app pulled from App Store by Apple

Enlarge (credit: Hinterhaus Productions | Getty Images)

Despite over 82 million cases and over 1.75 million deaths due to COVID-19, many people are bound and determined to carry on with normal life. For some, that includes attending Saturday night ragers, just like they did in the Before Times. Reports of yet another secret party being broken up by law enforcement have become distressingly common.

Getting guests for these secret parties is at least slightly more difficult now that Apple has pulled Vybe Together—an app with a tagline that invited users to "get their party on"—from the App Store. The Verge pointed out that the app had largely been flying under the radar until a tweet from Taylor Lorenz of the New York Times brought some unwelcome, but much-needed scrutiny to the app. One of Lorenz's tweets highlighted Vybe Together's TikTok account, which had posted videos of unmasked people partying indoors while advertising New Years Eve parties. According to Business Insider, TikTok has since removed Vybe Together's account for violating community guidelines.

They’re currently in the midst of promoting secret NYE ragers in nyc pic.twitter.com/dEIdwX1DKn

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) December 29, 2020

Vybe Together's FAQ at least acknowledged the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic. "We are aware that Covid is a major health problem to the country, our communities, our friends and family. If we could all just be in isolation this could actually go away." So far, so good.

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Amazon still hasn’t fixed its problem with bait-and-switch reviews

Enlarge / Our $24 drone. You can see the missing propeller on the right. (credit: Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica)

Like thousands of other parents, I decided to get my kids a cheap drone for Christmas. I spent $24 for a plastic flying machine with rudimentary collision-avoidance capabilities. A plastic cage mostly kept small fingers away from the four propellers. The kids were delighted for the first couple of hours.

Then my five-year-old daughter somehow managed to get one of the propellers stuck in her hair. The drone was never the same after that. Instead of hovering in the air, it started veering crazily to one side and falling to the floor. A couple of hours later, I noticed that another propeller—not the one that had grabbed my daughter's hair—had fallen off entirely. Now when you toss it up it immediately flips over and plunges to the floor.

The kids enjoyed the drone so much in its few brief hours of functionality that I thought I might buy them another one. (Hopefully this one would avoid my daughter's hair.) If I did more research and spent a bit more money, I hoped I could find a higher-quality model that wouldn't fall apart after a few hours.

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Protecting great apes from the unknown effects of COVID-19

Humans can transmit many diseases to chimps, orangutans and their kin. People who study and care for the creatures are taking lockdown-style measures to limit the risk. (credit: UMN.edu)

Wildlife veterinarian Stephen Ngulu starts his typical working day watching from a distance as the chimpanzees under his care eat their breakfast. He keeps an eye out for runny noses, coughing or other hints of illness.

These days, Ngulu and others at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy’s Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Kenya have doubled down on their vigilance.

Chimpanzees and other great apes—orangutans, gorillas and bonobos—are prone to many human viruses and other infections that plague people. So when SARS-CoV-2 began circulating, the community that studies and cares for great apes grew worried.

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WW1984 lassos solid box office return, record downloads for HBO Max

Enlarge / Wonder Woman 1984 posted the strongest box office showing yet during the pandemic, despite many movie theaters still being shuttered. Warner Bros. just fast-tracked a third film in the franchise with Director Patty Jenkins back at the helm.

Wonder Woman 1984 has posted the strongest box office showing yet during the ongoing pandemic, despite many movie theaters still being shuttered, raking in an estimated $85 million globally thus far. The film was simultaneously released on HBO Max on Christmas Day, and the streamer also reported that downloads were in high demand. In light of that strong showing (especially given the unprecedented circumstances), Warner Bros. has fast-tracked a third Wonder Woman film, with Patty Jenkins writing and returning as directors and Gal Gadot back in the title role.

“As fans around the world continue to embrace Diana Prince, driving the strong opening weekend performance of Wonder Woman 1984, we are excited to be able to continue her story with our real life Wonder Women—Gal and Patty—who will return to conclude the long-planned theatrical trilogy,” Toby Emmerich, Chairman of Warner Bros. Pictures Group, said in a statement.

The studio hasn't released any hard streaming numbers for HBO Max, just the following statement: “Nearly half of the platform’s retail subscribers viewing the film on the day of its arrival, along with millions of wholesale subscribers who have access to HBO Max via a cable, wireless, or other partner services. HBO Max also saw the total viewing hours on Friday more than triple in comparison to a typical day in the previous month." But according to Bloomberg News, the market-research firm Apptopia estimated that 554,000 users signed up for the HBO Max app between Friday (Christmas Day) and Sunday. There were 244,000 downloads on Sunday alone, a single-day record for the streaming platform.

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Wooden satellites an intriguing idea, but won’t solve space junk problems

Enlarge / An experimental satellite, not made of wood, that was used to test ideas for orbital junk removal. (credit: NASA)

We here at Ars were somewhat surprised to stumble across a BBC headline indicating that a university-industry partnership in Japan was working on developing wooden satellites. The plan is less insane than it sounds—wood is a remarkable material that's largely unappreciated because of its ubiquity. But most of the reasons to shift to wood give in the coverage of the plan completely misses the mark.

To the degree that there is a plan, at least. According to the BBC and other coverage, the partnership is between Kyoto University and a company called Sumitomo Forestry. But neither the university nor the company has any information on the project available on the English-language versions of their websites. The BBC article gets all its quotes from Takao Doi, who's currently faculty at Kyoto University. According to Doi, the collaboration is on track to be manufacturing flight models of wooden satellites by 2023.

While wood may seem like a horrific fit for the harsh environment of space, the idea may seem less insane if you think of wood in terms of its structural composition: a mix of two robust polymers, cellulose and lignin. The strength and durability of wood depends heavily on the ratio of these polymers and what's also present in the mix with them. But it's also possible to physically and chemically treat wood to alter its properties further. One version of wood was as strong as aluminum by some measures, and had some interesting additional properties. And a forestry company can be expected to have extensive knowledge of how to process wood.

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Computer repairman suing Twitter for defamation, seeks $500 million

Enlarge (credit: Tom Raftery | Flickr)

The former owner of a computer repair shop in Delaware is suing Twitter for defamation, alleging that the platform's choice to moderate a New York Post story that cited him as a source is tantamount to labeling him personally a "hacker."

Twitter's "actions and statements had the specific intent to communicate to the world" that John Paul Mac Isaac "is a hacker," the suit (PDF) alleges, eventually forcing him to shut down his Delaware business. Mac Isaac is seeking $500 million in punitive damages from the suit, as well as whatever "further relief" the court deems appropriate.

The alleged defamation ties to a specific October episode in a fall that was, frankly, full of strange episodes. On October 14, the New York Post ran a story alleging that President-Elect Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, had connected his father with Ukrainian energy firm Burisma in 2014. These allegations were based on emails the Post said it got from Trump attorney and former New York mayor Rudy Giliani, who in turn allegedly obtained them from a laptop that Biden's son Hunter dropped off at Mac Isaac's computer repair shop in 2019.

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Did Columbus find early Caribs in 15th century Caribbean? Jury is still out

Enlarge / Earlier this year, researchers analyzed the skulls of early Caribbean inhabitants, using 3D facial "landmarks" as a genetic proxy for determining how closely people groups were related to one another. A follow-up study this month added ancient DNA analysis into the mix, with conflicting results. (credit: Ann Ross/North Carolina State University)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: how facial characteristic analysis and DNA analysis, combined with archaeological work, are helping shed light on the history of the Caribbean's original islanders.

In his accounts of encounters with the inhabitants of the Caribbean Islands in the 15th century, Christopher Columbus made several allusions to Carib raids upon peaceful Arawak villages, including sensational claims of the invaders eating the men and taking the women as wives. "I saw some who had marks of wounds on their bodies and I made signs to them asking what they were," Columbus wrote in one account from his first voyage, upon arriving on the Bahamian island of Guanahani. "They showed me how people from other islands nearby came there and tried to take them, and how they defended themselves; and I believed and believe that they come Tierra Firme to take them captive."

Most archaeologists have long dismissed these accounts as myths, but new scientific tools are helping shed light on the truth of the Caribbean's original islanders. And the conflicting results of two separate studies, published 11 months apart, are raising fresh questions. The results of an analysis of facial characteristics from ancient human skulls from the region seemed to indicate Columbus' account was accurate, according to a January paper published in Scientific Reports. But a follow-up paper published last week in Nature yields a different picture with its combination of genetic analysis with decades of archaeological research.

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