Ars Technica

The western North Carolina plant that makes 60 percent of the country's intravenous fluid supply has restarted its highest-producing manufacturing line after being ravaged by flooding brought by Hurricane Helene last month.

While it's an encouraging sign of recovery as hospitals nationwide struggle with shortages of fluids, supply is still likely to remain tight for the coming weeks.

IV fluid-maker Baxter Inc, which runs the Marion plant inundated by Helene, said Thursday that the restarted production line could produce, at peak, 25 percent of the plant's total production and about 50 percent of the plant's production of one-liter IV solutions, the product most commonly used by hospitals and clinics.

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Starlink's home Internet service has come to the National Radio Quiet Zone after a multi-year engineering project that had the goal of minimizing interference with radio telescopes. Starlink operator SpaceX began "a one-year assessment period to offer residential satellite Internet service to 99.5% of residents within the NRQZ starting October 25," the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Green Bank Observatory announced last week.

"The vast majority of people within the areas of Virginia and West Virginia collectively known as the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) can now receive high speed satellite Internet service," the announcement said. "The newly available service is the result of a nearly three-year collaborative engineering effort between the US National Science Foundation (NSF), SpaceX, and the NSF National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NSF NRAO), which operates the NSF Green Bank Observatory (NSF GBO) in West Virginia within the NRQZ."

There's a controversy over the 0.5 percent of residents who aren't included and are said to be newly blocked from using the Starlink Roam service. Starlink markets Roam as a service for people to use while traveling, not as a fixed home Internet service.

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It's no secret that the new spinoff series, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, was inspired by the 1985 film The Goonies. Executive Producer Kathleen Kennedy (who co-produced The Goonies) has publicly confirmed as much. The latest trailer really leans into that influence: The series feels like something not created specifically for kids, but rather telling a story that just happens to be about kids going on an adventure.

As previously reported, the eight-episode standalone series is set in the same timeframe as The Mandalorian and Ahsoka. Per the official premise:

Skeleton Crew follows the journey of four kids who make a mysterious discovery on their seemingly safe home planet, then get lost in a strange and dangerous galaxy, crossing paths with the likes of Jod Na Nawood, the mysterious character played by [Jude] Law. Finding their way home—and meeting unlikely allies and enemies—will be a greater adventure than they ever imagined.

Jude Law leads the cast as the quick-witted and charming (per Law) "Force-user" Jod Na Nawood. Ravi Cabot-Conyers plays Wim, Ryan Kiera Armstrong plays Fern, Kyriana Kratter plays KB, and Robert Timothy Smith plays Neil. Nick Frost will voice a droid named SM 33, the first mate of a spaceship called the Onyx Cylinder. The cast also includes Fred Tatasciore as Brutus, Jaleel White as Gunther, Mike Estes as Pax, Marti Matulis as Vane, and Dale Soules as Chaelt. Tunde Adebimpe and Kerry Condon will appear in as-yet-undisclosed roles.

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Pixelmator, the Lithuania-based firm that makes popular Mac-based photo editing tools, has agreed to be acquired by Apple.

The company says that, pending regulatory approval, there will be "no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time," but to "Stay tuned for exciting updates to come." The Pixelmator team, now 17 years old, states that its staff will join Apple. Details of the acquisition price were not made public.

Fans of Pixelmator's apps, which are notably one-time purchases, unlike Adobe's tools, may be hoping that those "exciting updates" do not include the sublimation of Pixelmator into an Apple product at some future time, while the Pixelmator apps disappear.

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Humane’s AI Pin was already struggling to take off, but the company's troubles deepened on Thursday as it recalled the product's portable charging case.

Humane released the AI Pin in April 2024. It’s a lapel pin that features an integrated camera and speaker, AI voice assistant, and laser projector. The device launched at a $700 starting price before dropping to $500 in June. The AI Pin also requires a subscription ($24 per month without fees). The wearable lacks a screen or app support, and despite marketing claims that it could replace smartphones, initial reviews of the product were abysmal (YouTuber Marques Brownlee famously dubbed the pin "The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed").

The AI Pin's wireless Charge Case Accessory is sold separately; it differs from the home charging dock included with the AI Pin, which isn't impacted by this week's recall. The Charge Case Accessory is charged via USB-C.

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Many species of bats use echolocation to avoid obstacles like tree branches and hunt small insects as they fly through the dark. But it turns out echolocation for bats is much more than just a short-range obstacle-avoidance and prey-targeting system. A recent study shows that one species of bats can stitch together thousands upon thousands of sound signatures into acoustic maps they use to successfully navigate several kilometers over their hunting grounds. The maps work even if the bats are completely blindfolded.

“What echolocating bats do is they emit sounds, ultrasonic or not, and use the characteristics of the reflected echo to sense objects they have in front of them. We wanted to know if they use it for large-scale navigation. Most people think, 'Of course they do,' but the reality is we didn’t know that,” says Aya Goldshtein, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany. Goldshtein collaborated with scientists at Tel Aviv University on a study of how a species of bats called Kuhl’s pipistrelle navigate in their natural environment.

There were several reasons that navigation via echolocation wasn’t obvious at all. For starters, echolocation is hopelessly limited when it comes to range. Bats can use it to sense objects that are at most a few dozen meters away. It’s a tool closer to an ultrasonic parking sensor in a car than to a long-distance sonar in a submarine. It is also not omnidirectional. The cone of coverage bats get from echolocation is usually a maximum of 120 degrees, although they can modulate it to an extent, depending on the shape of their mouths.

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Humans who think they can multitask while sitting at the wheel of a moving car continue to be a problem—one that claimed more than 3,300 lives in 2022, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The problem is almost entirely down to our smartphones—while we know they're distracting, too many drivers just can't help checking that email when they shouldn't. Now a new online tool provides an easy way to grasp just how much of the road we can miss while playing with that phone.

The distracted driving tool was developed by Quanta, a "context-based insurance provider," which wants to raise awareness of the problem. "Quanata’s technology aims to create a future where risk-informed choices enable safer drivers and better lives. We recognize that a lot of the danger on our roads is caused by distracted driving and we want to help minimize that," said Jim Ryan, SVP of business development at Quanta.

The tests include preparing a text message while your car drives at 70 mph and then a comparison of reaction times at 70 mph when concentrating on the task of driving versus trying to assemble an order in a fast food app.

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Anyone familiar with HR practices probably knows of the decades of studies showing that résumé with Black- and/or female-presenting names at the top get fewer callbacks and interviews than those with white- and/or male-presenting names—even if the rest of the résumé is identical. A new study shows those same kinds of biases also show up when large language models are used to evaluate résumés instead of humans.

In a new paper published during last month's AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics and Society, two University of Washington researchers ran hundreds of publicly available résumés and job descriptions through three different Massive Text Embedding (MTE) models. These models—based on the Mistal-7B LLM—had each been fine-tuned with slightly different sets of data to improve on the base LLM's abilities in "representational tasks including document retrieval, classification, and clustering," according to the researchers, and had achieved "state-of-the-art performance" in the MTEB benchmark.

Rather than asking for precise term matches from the job description or evaluating via a prompt (e.g., "does this résumé fit the job description?"), the researchers used the MTEs to generate embedded relevance scores for each résumé and job description pairing. To measure potential bias, the résuméwere first run through the MTEs without any names (to check for reliability) and were then run again with various names that achieved high racial and gender "distinctiveness scores" based on their actual use across groups in the general population. The top 10 percent of résumés that the MTEs judged as most similar for each job description were then analyzed to see if the names for any race or gender groups were chosen at higher or lower rates than expected.

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When Microsoft launched its Copilot+ AI PC initiative over the summer, one of the flagship features was Recall, a feature that would log months' worth of your PC usage, with the stated goal of helping you remember things you did and find them again. But if you've heard of Recall, it's probably because of the problems that surfaced in preview builds of Windows before the feature could launch: It stored all of its data in plaintext, and it was relatively trivial for other users on the PC (or for malicious software) to access the database and screenshots, potentially exposing huge amounts of user data.

Microsoft was supposed to launch Recall over the summer but delayed the feature to rework it. The company went into detail on the new version of Recall's security protections in late September, declaring that a preview would be ready in time for Windows Insider Program testers in October. Now that we're past October, Microsoft has officially announced that the Recall preview is being delayed yet again and that it will begin rolling out to testers in December.

“We are committed to delivering a secure and trusted experience with Recall. To ensure we deliver on these important updates, we’re taking additional time to refine the experience before previewing it with Windows Insiders,” said Microsoft Windows Insider Senior Program Manager Brandon LeBlanc in a statement provided to The Verge.

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Becky Carroll was missing a few teeth, others were stained or crooked. Ashamed, she smiled with lips pressed closed. Her dentist offered to fix most of her teeth with root canals and crowns, Carroll said, but she was wary of traveling a long road of dental work.

Then Carroll saw a TV commercial for another path: ClearChoice Dental Implant Centers. The company advertises that it can give patients “a new smile in as little as one day” by surgically replacing teeth instead of fixing them.

So Carroll saved and borrowed for the surgery, she said. In an interview and a lawsuit, Carroll said that at a ClearChoice clinic in New Jersey in 2021, she agreed to pay $31,000 to replace all her natural upper teeth with pearly white prosthetic ones. What came next, Carroll said, was “like a horror movie.”

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Boeing's Starliner spacecraft safely landed empty in the New Mexico desert about eight weeks ago, marking a hollow end to the company's historic first human spaceflight. The vehicle's passengers during its upward flight to the International Space Station earlier this summer, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, remain in space, awaiting a ride home on SpaceX's Crew Dragon.

Boeing has been steadfastly silent about the fate of Starliner since then. Two senior officials, including Boeing's leader of human spaceflight, John Shannon, were originally due to attend a post-landing news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston. However, just minutes before the news conference was to begin, two seats were removed—the Boeing officials were no-shows.

In lieu of speaking publicly, Boeing issued a terse statement early on the morning of September 8, attributing it to Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing's commercial crew program. "We will review the data and determine the next steps for the program," Nappi said, in part.

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Welcome to Edition 7.18 of the Rocket Report! One of the most intriguing bits of news this week is the rolling of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket out to its launch complex in Florida. With two months remaining in 2024, will the company make owner Jeff Bezos' deadline for getting to orbit this year? We'll have to see, as the Rocket Report is not prepared to endorse any timelines at the moment.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

ESA selects four companies for reusable launch. The European Space Agency announced this week the selection of Rocket Factory Augsburg, The Exploration Company, ArianeGroup, and Isar Aerospace to develop reusable rocket technology, European Spaceflight reports. The four awardees are divided into two initiatives focused on the development of reusable rocket technology: the Technologies for High-thrust Reusable Space Transportation (THRUST!) project and the Boosters for European Space Transportation (BEST!) project. The awarded companies will now begin contract negotiations with ESA to further develop and test their solutions.

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The European Commission announced Thursday it plans to sign a contract with the continent's leading space companies before the end of the year to begin development of a 290-satellite broadband Internet network estimated to cost more than 10 billion euros (about $10.9 billion).

The press release announcing the contract award to IRIS²—known as Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite—did not specify the financial details of the agreement, but European media has widely reported the 10 billion euro cost. The commission's decision follows an evaluation of the best-and-final offer from the SpaceRISE consortium formed by European satellite network operators SES, Eutelsat, and Hispasat.

The European Commission, the European Union's executive arm, is managing the IRIS² program, which will also receive funding from the European Space Agency and European industry in a public-private partnership. European governments previously expected to provide around 60 percent of the funding for the initiative. Under that plan, European industry would supply roughly 40 percent of the money in a public-private partnership. The specifics of the final cost-sharing arrangement were not available Thursday.

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Earlier this week, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. used a Zoom call to tell his supporters that Donald Trump had promised him "control" of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the federal agency that includes the Centers for Disease Control, Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, as well as the Department of Agriculture. Given Kennedy's support for debunked anti-vaccine nonsense, this represents a potential public health nightmare.

A few days after, Howard Lutnick, a co-chair of Trump's transition team, appeared on CNN to deny that RFK Jr. would be put in charge of HHS. But he followed that with a long rant in which he echoed Kennedy's spurious claims about vaccines. This provides yet another indication of how anti-vaccine activism has become deeply enmeshed with Republican politics, to the point where it may be just as bad even if Kennedy isn't appointed.

Kennedy has a long history of misinformation regarding health, with a special focus on vaccines. This includes the extensively debunked suggestion that there is a correlation between vaccinations and autism incidence, and it extends to a general skepticism about vaccine safety. That's mixed with conspiracy theories regarding collusion between federal regulators and pharmaceutical companies.

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There's a lot going on in the world of Mac apps for popular AI services. In the past week, Anthropic has released a desktop app for its popular Claude chatbot, and Perplexity launched a native app for its AI-driven search service.

On top of that, OpenAI updated its ChatGPT Mac app with support for its flashy advanced voice feature.

Like the ChatGPT app that debuted several weeks ago, the Perplexity app adds a keyboard shortcut that allows you to enter a query from anywhere on your desktop. You can use the app to ask follow-up questions and carry on a conversation about what it finds.

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The Colorado Department of State said it accidentally posted a spreadsheet containing "partial passwords" for voting systems. The department said there is no "immediate security threat" because two passwords are needed for each component, but it is trying to complete password changes by the end of today. There were reportedly hundreds of BIOS passwords accessible on the website for over two months before being removed last week.

A government statement issued Tuesday said the agency "is aware that a spreadsheet located on the Department's website improperly included a hidden tab including partial passwords to certain components of Colorado voting systems. This does not pose an immediate security threat to Colorado's elections, nor will it impact how ballots are counted."

Secretary of State Jena Griswold told Colorado Public Radio that they "do not think there is an immediate security threat to Colorado elections, in part because partial passwords don't get you anywhere. Two unique passwords are needed for every election equipment component. Physical access is needed. And under Colorado law, voting equipment is stored in secure rooms that require secure ID badges. There's 24/7 video cameras. There's restricted access to the secure ballot areas, strict chain of custody, and it's a felony to access voting equipment without authorization."

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You might think that since Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (which was released last Friday) is the 21st game in the franchise, it wouldn't be that highly anticipated. You'd be wrong. Last week's entry set multiple records when it launched.

Specifically, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the game set new records for Game Pass subscribers, particularly for a first-day game launch. That's, of course, to be expected—Call of Duty was a major reason why Microsoft acquired Activision, the longtime publisher of the series.

It gets a little zanier, though. The Internet service provider Comcast says Black Ops 6 was directly responsible for 19 percent of its overall traffic the week of the launch, according to a report in The Verge.

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Residents in the Southwest District Health in Idaho are no longer able to get COVID-19 vaccines from public health clinics after the district's board of directors voted 4–3 recently to stop administering the shot.

The vote came during a hearing swamped by misinformation and conspiracy theories about the lifesaving vaccines. It's a chilling reminder of how dangerous anti-vaccine sentiment and misinformation have infested communities nationwide, causing vaccination rates to slip across the country and making way for deadly outbreaks of preventable diseases.

In a hearing last week, Perry Jansen, the health district’s medical director, gave the only presentation that favored keeping COVID-19 vaccines available through district clinics. He echoed the points that all health experts and major health organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have pointed out for years: that COVID-19 vaccines have proven to be safe, lifesaving immunizations that are recommended for everyone ages 6 months and up.

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What's the point of recruiting hundreds of thousands of X users to fact-check misleading posts before they go viral if those users' accurate Community Notes are never displayed?

That's the question the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) is asking after digging through a million notes in a public X dataset to find out how many misleading claims spreading widely on X about the US election weren't quickly fact-checked.

In a report, the CCDH flagged 283 misleading X posts fueling election disinformation spread this year that never displayed a Community Note. Of these, 74 percent were found to have accurate notes proposed but ultimately never displayed—apparently due to toxic X users gaming Community Notes to hide information they politically disagree with.

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Halloween is upon us, which means costumes, candy, and settling in for a nice long night of scary movies. For those who crave a bit of humor with their blood-soaked scares, I've compiled a list of some of my favorite horror comedies for your viewing pleasure.

What constitutes a horror comedy? Is it merging classic creature features with goofy slapstick humor? Is it primarily super scary with a few notes of humor? Is the humor sharply satirical or primarily delivered by wisecracking characters? Is it parody? Or does good horror comedy go full meta, poking fun at the tropes while sneaking in incisive cultural commentary?

Horror comedy is all of those things and more, which is why picking films to include on this list proved so tricky. For instance, The Mummy (1999) features a classic monster, but it fits just as well in the action/comedy category, while Ghostbusters (1984) is pretty much straight-up comedy. Yet I could have included both on this list without too many complaints. In the end, I cut the list down to 20, opting for a sampler that features blockbusters, vintage films, cult classics, and contemporary offerings, each with its own unique mix of horror and comedic elements. Feel free to add your own favorites in the comments.

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