What’s really going on with Elon Musk, the FAA, and Starship?

Enlarge / Starship prototype SN9 has not launched yet. (credit: SpaceX)

There were moments of high drama on Thursday afternoon, and again Friday morning, in South Texas. For two days in a row, SpaceX evacuated the handful of residents remaining in Boca Chica Village. Sheriff's deputies cleared beaches and closed roads. And at the company's launch site, a Starship rocket prototype underwent preparations for launch.

The vehicle was ready, with ground equipment venting away. The winds were light. And then—nothing. As the hours ticked by, the rocket remained on the ground. Unfortunately for SpaceX, the Federal Aviation Administration had not given its final approval to launch. It all made for quite a South Texas Showdown.

SpaceX, which officially said it was targeting a launch attempt on Thursday, has not publicly commented on what happened. Nor has the FAA provided specifics on what transpired, other than offering a generic statement: “We will continue working with SpaceX to resolve outstanding safety issues before we approve the next test flight.”

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It’s the wombat’s strange intestines, not its anus, that produces cubed poo

Enlarge / Look at this lovely cube-shaped piece of poo, courtesy of the Australian bare-nosed wombat. (credit: Patricia J. Yang et al., 2021)

Scientists have been puzzling for decades over how the Australian bare-nosed wombat poops out neat little cubes of feces instead of tapered cylinders like pretty much all other animals. According to a new paper published in the journal Soft Matter, the secret lies in their intestines, which have varying stiff and soft regions that serve to shape the poo during the digestive process. Earlier preliminary findings by the same group won the 2019 Ig Nobel Physics Prize.

"Bare-nosed wombats are renowned for producing distinctive, cube-shaped poos. This ability to form relatively uniform, clean cut feces is unique in the animal kingdom," said University of Tasmania wildlife ecologist Scott Carver, a co-author on the paper. "They place these feces at prominent points in their home range, such as around a rock or a log, to communicate with each other. Our research found that these cubes are formed within the last sections of the intestine—and finally proves that you really can fit a square peg through a round hole."

Zoologist Eric Guiler first noted the unusual shape of wombat droppings in 1960, and to date, wombats are the only known animals to produce six-sided cube-shaped poo. It's one of several examples of naturally occurring pattern formation, such as the columns of Ireland's Giant's Causeway (formed by cooling lava), or how vibrating membranes can make grains of sand form "Chladni figures." But naturally occurring cube shapes are extremely rare. The Australian bare-nosed wombat (Vombatus ursinus) can pump out as many as 100 cube-shaped droppings a day.

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Cable ISP warns “excessive” uploaders, says network can’t handle heavy usage

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Bosca78)

Mediacom, a cable company with about 1.4 million Internet customers across 22 states, is telling heavy uploaders to reduce their data usage—even when those users are well below their monthly data caps.

Mediacom's fastest Internet plan offers gigabit download speeds and 50Mbps upload speeds with a monthly data cap of 6TB. But as Stop the Cap wrote in a detailed report on Wednesday, the ISP is "reach[ing] out to a growing number of its heavy uploaders and telling them to reduce usage or face a speed throttle or the possible closure of their account." Mediacom told Ars that it is contacting heavy uploaders "more frequently than before" because of increased usage triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The company said that heavy uploaders "may be under their total bandwidth usage allowance but still have a negative impact on Mediacom’s network."

Mediacom's terms and conditions say the company charges $10 fees for each additional block of 50GB used by customers who exceed the data cap. But users may be warned about their usage long before they risk overage fees. One user in East Moline, Illinois, who described the predicament on a DSLReports forum in early January, said they paid for the 6TB plan "to make sure we wouldn't go over the cap" and had never used more than 4TB. The user wrote:

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No, WallStreetBets isn’t robbing Wall Street to help the little guy

Enlarge / A closed GameStop store in Frankfurt, Germany, on Friday, Jan. 29, 2021. (credit: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

You've probably seen stories about GameStop, the struggling video game retailer that has improbably seen its stock quintuple since the start of the week. The stock isn't up because GameStop announced strong financial results or a new turnaround strategy. Instead, it was the focus of a coordinated buying campaign by members of the WallStreetBets subreddit.

The effort has been so effective in part because its architects have convinced people that it's not just a pump and dump scheme. Instead, they've painted a seductive story in which retail investors found a loophole that allows them to make money at the expense of hedge funds and other wealthy investors who had shorted the stock.

In reality, most of the gains captured by early GameStop investors will come at the expense of later investors who will be left holding the bag when the stock falls.

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30% of “SolarWinds hack” victims didn’t actually use SolarWinds

Enlarge / This is an artist's concept of Wind, a NASA spacecraft which spent twenty years gathering data on the solar wind (no relation). (credit: US Department of State)

When security firm Malwarebytes announced last week that it had been targeted by the same attacker that compromised SolarWinds' Orion software, it noted that the attack did not use SolarWinds itself. According to Malwarebytes, the attacker had used "another intrusion vector" to gain access to a limited subset of company emails.

Brandon Wales, acting director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), said nearly a third of the organizations attacked had no direct connection to SolarWinds.

[The attackers] gained access to their targets in a variety of ways. This adversary has been creative... it is absolutely correct that this campaign should not be thought of as the SolarWinds campaign.

Many of the attacks gained initial footholds by password spraying to compromise individual email accounts at targeted organizations. Once the attackers had that initial foothold, they used a variety of complex privilege escalation and authentication attacks to exploit flaws in Microsoft's cloud services. Another of the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)'s targets, security firm CrowdStrike, said the attacker tried unsuccessfully to read its email by leveraging a compromised account of a Microsoft reseller the firm had worked with.

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Robinhood’s plan to “democratize finance” hit a GameStop-shaped speed bump

Enlarge / Ready, take aim, and let fly... (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

As the price of heavily shorted stocks like GameStop has shot up in recent days, so, too, has interest in retail trading apps like Robinhood. That app, launched in 2013 with a promise to "democratize finance for all," offers so-called retail investors simple, zero-fee trades as an easy way to gamble on quick movement of individual stocks.

But that smooth path to playing the market hit a bump Thursday morning, when Robinhood announced that it was suspending the ability to purchase 13 extremely volatile stocks, including GameStop.

In the hours following the announcement, GameStop's stock price first shot up to a high of nearly $470, then cratered to a low of about $126 by 11:20am. The price then turned back upward and has currently stabilized around $310 as of this writing.

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COVID variants throw J&J vaccine a curveball, lowering efficacy to 66%

Enlarge (credit: Getty | SOPA Images)

Johnson & Johnson’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine was 72 percent effective at preventing moderate and severe disease in the United States and 85 percent effective at preventing severe disease globally. But the one-shot vaccine struggled to fight off emerging virus variants in other countries, lowering its overall efficacy to 66 percent.

The topline results from Johnson & Johnson’s Phase III ENSEMBLE trial, announced Friday, suggest the vaccine will be yet another much-needed weapon against the pandemic virus, which has now infected over 100 million worldwide and killed nearly 2.2 million.

“Changing the trajectory of the pandemic will require mass vaccination to create herd immunity, and a single-dose regimen with fast onset of protection and ease of delivery and storage provides a potential solution to reaching as many people as possible,” said Mathai Mammen, global head of research and development at Janssen Pharmaceutical (owned by J&J). “The ability to avoid hospitalizations and deaths would change the game in combating the pandemic.”

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