Japan's Honda Motor said on Wednesday it will be the world's first automaker to mass produce sensor-packed level 3 autonomous cars that will allow drivers to let their vehicles navigate congested expressway traffic. From a report: "Honda is planning to launch sales of a Honda Legend (luxury sedan) equipped with the newly approved automated driving equipment" before the end of March 2021, Honda said in a press release. The race to build self-driving cars is a key technology battleground for automakers, with technology companies such as Google parent Alphabet Inc also investing billions of dollars in a field expected to boost car sales. Japan's government earlier in the day awarded a safety certification to Honda's autonomous "Traffic Jam Pilot" driving technology, which legally allow drivers to take their eyes off the road. "Self driving cars are expected to play a big role in helping reduce traffic accidents, provide transportation for the elderly and improve logistics," said Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. There are six levels of vehicle autonomy, from 0 to 5, ranging from manual cars or those with simple functions such as cruise control to fully self-driving vehicles that would not need steering wheels, or brake and acceleration pedals.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: SoftBank Group Corp. is in talks to sell robot maker Boston Dynamics to Hyundai, people familiar with the matter said. Proposed terms of the deal would give the South Korean automaker control of the robotics company in a transaction valued at as much as $1 billion, said one of the people, all of whom asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. The terms have yet to be finalized, and the deal could fall apart, said the people. A sale of Boston Dynamics would mark another twist in the trajectory of a company that spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1990s and operated independently until Google bought it in 2013. It was sold again in 2017, that time to SoftBank. At times, Boston Dynamics has functioned more like a research organization than a business, churning out machines that are technologically advanced and whimsical but unprofitable. That includes Spot, a maneuverable dog-like robot. Videos of its creations regularly rack up millions of views on YouTube; however, the company has said it is not currently generating profits. By contrast, Hyundai makes highly practical industrial robots intended for factory use.

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Dish Network announced that it will permanently shut down all of Sling Media's Slingbox services and end support for the devices in two years, at which point they'll no longer work. Variety reports: On Monday, Dish's Sling Media unit announced that Slingbox servers will be permanently taken offline 24 months from Nov. 9, 2020. "Until then, most Slingbox models will continue to work normally, but the number of supported devices for viewing will steadily decrease as versions of the SlingPlayer apps become outdated and/or lose compatibility," the company said in a message posted Monday. In an FAQ about the shutdown, Dish said Slingbox is being discontinued because "We've had to make room for new innovative products so that we can continue to serve our customers in the best way possible." Sling will not be releasing any new products; most authorized resellers have been out of stock of the Slingbox devices "for a couple years," according to the company. Sling Media was acquired by EchoStar in 2007 for $380 million, which at the time was Dish's parent company. Years before Netflix became a streaming powerhouse, the Slingbox "place-shifting" devices let customers watch pay-TV channels over the internet. But the products never became a mainstream category in the way streaming-media players like Roku and Amazon's Fire TV have.

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A British firm has won a European Space Agency contract to develop the technology to turn moon dust and rocks into oxygen, leaving behind aluminium, iron and other metal powders for lunar construction workers to build with. The Guardian reports: If the process can be made to work well enough, it will pave the way for extraction facilities on the moon that make oxygen and valuable materials on the surface, rather than having to haul them into space at enormous cost. Analyses of rocks brought back from the moon reveal that oxygen makes up about 45% of the material by weight. The remainder is largely iron, aluminium and silicon. In work published this year, scientists at Metalysis and the University of Glasgow found they could extract 96% of the oxygen from simulated lunar soil, leaving useful metal alloy powders behind. The Esa contract will fund Metalysis for nine months to perfect an electrochemical process that releases oxygen from lunar dust and rocks by sending an electrical current through the material. The process is already used on Earth, but the oxygen is released as an unwanted byproduct of mineral extraction. To make it work for lunar explorers, the oxygen must be captured and stored. Under the contract, the firm will try to boost the yield and purity of oxygen and metals from the rock while reducing the amount of energy the process consumes. If the technology looks promising, the next step will be to demonstrate oxygen extraction on the moon. The oxygen released from the lunar surface can be combined with other gases to produce breathable air, but it is also a vital component of rocket propellant that could be manufactured on the moon and used to refuel spacecraft bound for deep space.

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An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from Wired: On Monday morning, when representatives from the drug company Pfizer said that its Covid-19 vaccine appears to be more than 90 percent effective, stocks soared, White House officials rushed to (falsely) claim credit, and sighs of relief went up all around the internet. [...] The arrival of an effective vaccine to fight SARS-CoV-2 less than a year after the novel coronavirus emerged would smash every record ever set by vaccine makers. "Historic isn't even the right word," says Larry Corey of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. A renowned virologist, Corey has spent the last three decades leading the search for a vaccine against the virus that causes AIDS. He's never seen an inoculation developed for a new bug in under five years, let alone one. "It's never happened before, never, not even close," he says. "It's just an amazing accomplishment of science." And perhaps even more monumental is the kind of vaccine that Pfizer and BioNTech are bringing across the finish line. The active ingredient inside their shot is mRNA -- mobile strings of genetic code that contain the blueprints for proteins. Cells use mRNA to get those specs out of hard DNA storage and into their protein-making factories. The mRNA inside Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine directs any cells it reaches to run a coronavirus spike-building program. The viral proteins these cells produce can't infect any other cells, but they are foreign enough to trip the body's defense systems. They also look enough like the real virus to train the immune system to recognize SARS-CoV-2, should its owner encounter the infectious virus in the future. Up until now, this technology has never been approved for use in people. A successful mRNA vaccine won't just be a triumph over the new coronavirus, it'll be a huge leap forward for the science of vaccine making. [I]n the last decade, the field has started to move away from this see-what-sticks approach toward something pharma folks call "rational drug design." It involves understanding the structure and function of the target -- like say, the spiky protein SARS-CoV-2 uses to get into human cells -- and building molecules that can either bind to that target directly, or produce other molecules that can. Genetic vaccines represent an important step in this scientific evolution. Engineers can now design strands of mRNA on computers, guided by algorithms that predict which combination of genetic letters will yield a viral protein with just the right shape to prod the human body into producing protective antibodies. In the last few years, it's gotten much easier and cheaper to make mRNA and DNA at scale, which means that as soon as scientists have access to a new pathogen's genome, they can start whipping up hundreds or thousands of mRNA snippets to test -- each one a potential vaccine. The Chinese government released the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 in mid-January. By the end of February, BioNTech had identified 20 vaccine candidates, of which four were then selected for human trials in Germany. [...] Genetic vaccines might be proving they can work -- but it's still not definitive, and they may not yet work for everyone. That's why experts say it's so crucial to continue supporting ongoing trials for the more than 60 other vaccine candidates still in various stages of human testing. What older technologies lack in terms of speed, they make up for in durability.

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An Alphabet X innovation lab project has been working on a high-speed wireless optical communications network that uses beams of light instead of cables or radio waves, and folks in Kenya will be the first to benefit from the fruits of these labors. New Atlas reports: Project Taara, a part of Alphabet's X moonshot factory, has been working on a wireless optical technology that could deliver high-speed, high-capacity connectivity to remote areas using a network of light emitters and receivers. The initiative has now partnered with the Econet Group to install its technology in Sub-Saharan Africa, starting with Kenya. Rather than rely on cables to carry data, which can prove challenging or costly to roll out in the region, Project Taara will send information at up to 20 Gbps using a narrow, invisible beam of light. The beam is transmitted between Taara terminals to create a network of line-of-sight data links, with up to 20 km (12 mi) between two links possible. There does need to be a constant flow of data between the links, so engineers place the terminals high above ground on poles, rooftops and towers. The technology has already undergone pilot testing in Kenya (and India) and will now roll out from existing Liquid Telecom (a subsidiary of Econet) fiber optic networks to serve remote areas beyond the reach of traditional solutions -- such as over bodies of water, through forests, national parks and post-conflict zones. It is hoped that the optical network could also help to plug coverage gaps of cell towers and Wi-Fi hotspots.

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Uber is rolling out a new feature this week that will let users reserve rides up to 30 days in advance and pick their favorite driver for the trip as the ride-hailing company seeks new ways to attract customers during the COVID-19 pandemic. TechCrunch reports: The new option, called Uber Reserve, which will begin to show up on the app in the next week, is designed for users who want to book a ride at least two hours in advance. Uber said it will keep its current "schedule a ride" option for those trips that fall under that two hours in advance timeline. Riders who use the Reserve feature will be shown their fare upfront and be matched to a driver ahead of the trip. The company has also folded in a "favorite driver" option. Riders can now add favorite drivers to their app. Once they select the Reserve features, riders will have the option to select one of their "favorite drivers." These favorite drivers will be offered to them first. Uber stressed that drivers aren't penalized for opting not to take the ride. The ride-hailing company baked in two other perks, an additional 15-minute grace period if the rider is running late and an on-time guarantee that will give users $50 in Uber Cash if their driver is even a minute late to the ride they have scheduled. That Uber Cash will come directly from Uber, not the driver's earnings, the company told TechCrunch. Uber said it's added protection for the drivers as well. If a Reserve ride is canceled within an hour of the trip, the driver will receive the full fare.

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Today, Apple showed off the first Macs powered by its new M1 CPU, delivering impressive performance and excellent battery life, however they won't come without any compromises. According to Engadget, citing Paul Gerhardt's tweet, "tech spec pages for the new machines reveal that none of them are compatible with external GPUs that connect via Thunderbolt." From the report: Only some people would require add-on oomph in any case, but Apple's support for external graphics cards gave it some extra gaming cachet and informed creative professionals their needs would continue to be met. Now, they'll have to wait and see if things change for higher-end models as Apple Silicon spreads throughout the company's PC lineup. There's also been some focus on the fact that the 13-inch MacBook Pro M1 models only include two USB-C ports onboard instead of four, but whether or not you think that's enough ports, it's consistent with the cheaper Intel models it replaces. A more striking limitation is the one we've already noted, that the MBP is limited to 16GB of RAM -- if you think you'll need 32GB then you'll have to opt for an Intel-powered model.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Krebs On Security: The body of a man found shot inside a burned out vehicle in Canada three years ago has been identified as that of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a prolific spammer and neo-Nazi who led a failed anti-government march on Washington, D.C. in 1999, according to news reports. Homicide detectives said they originally thought the man found June 14, 2017 in a torched SUV on a logging road in Squamish, British Columbia was a local rock climber known to others in the area as a politically progressive vegan named Jesse James. But according to a report from CTV News, at a press conference late last month authorities said new DNA evidence linked to a missing persons investigation has confirmed the man's true identity as Davis Wolfgang Hawke. A key subject of the book Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams, Hawke was a Jewish-born American who'd legally changed his name from Andrew Britt Greenbaum. For many years, Hawke was a big time purveyor of spam emails hawking pornography and male enhancement supplements, such as herbal Viagra. In 2005, AOL won a $12.8 million lawsuit against him for relentlessly spamming its users. More recently, Hawke's Jesse James identity penned a book called Psychology of Seduction, which claimed to merge the "shady world of the pickup artist with modern science, unraveling the mystery of attraction using evolutionary biology and examining seduction through the lens of social and evolutionary psychology." The book's "about the author" page said James was a "disruptive technology pioneer" who was into rock climbing and was a resident of Squamish. It also claimed James held a PhD in theoretical physics from Stanford, and that he was an officer in the Israeli Defense Force.

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A former Microsoft software engineer from Ukraine has been sentenced to nine years in prison for stealing more than $10 million in store credit from Microsoft's online store. Ars Technica reports: From 2016 to 2018, Volodymyr Kvashuk worked for Microsoft as a tester, placing mock online orders to make sure everything was working smoothly. The software automatically prevented shipment of physical products to testers like Kvashuk. But in a crucial oversight, it didn't block the purchase of virtual gift cards. So the 26-year-old Kvashuk discovered that he could use his test account to buy real store credit and then use the credit to buy real products. At first, Kvashuk bought an Office subscription and a couple of graphics cards. But when no one objected to those small purchases, he grew much bolder. In late 2017 and early 2018, he stole millions of dollars worth of Microsoft store credit and resold it online for bitcoin, which he then cashed out using Coinbase. US prosecutors say he netted at least $2.8 million, which he used to buy a $160,000 Tesla and a $1.6 million waterfront home (his proceeds were less than the value of the stolen credit because he had to sell at a steep discount). Kvashuk made little effort to cover his tracks for his earliest purchases. But as his thefts got bigger, he took more precautions. He used test accounts that had been created by colleagues for later thefts. This was easy to do because the testers kept track of test account credentials in a shared online document. He used throwaway email addresses and began using a virtual private networking service. Before cashing out the bitcoins, he sent them to a mixing service in an attempt to hide their origins. Kvashuk reported the bitcoin windfall to the IRS but claimed the bitcoins had been a gift from his father.

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At the end of Apple's big event today, where it launched three new Macs powered by the company's new M1 chip, the company had a surprise guest star: actor John Hodman reprising his role as the PC guy from Apple's "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC" commercials that ran in the mid-2000s. The Verge reports: In the short video, Hodgman's put-upon PC reacts to the announcement of Apple's new M1-powered Macs, complaining about the improved performance and battery life that the new chip purportedly offers on the updated Macs, compared to what PCs can do. (Absent is Justin Long's Mac character, who made up the other half of the ad spots.) The original ads -- launched in 2006, just after Apple began its last major architecture transition to Intel chips -- echoed a similar style, with Long's character extolling the virtues of the Mac while the hapless PC character would argue that the Windows side of things was just as good. It's not clear whether Apple will be resurrecting the ad campaign for the new line of M1 Macs, but it was a cute way to end the announcement as the company sets off on its next era of laptops and desktops. You can watch the clip featuring PC guy here.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Steve Bannon has been outed for his involvement in running a network of misinformation pages on Facebook. Who could have possibly seen this coming. Facebook has talked a big game about monitoring election misinformation, and yet the independent activist network Avaaz said it had to alert the company to the pages before it removed them for coordinated inauthentic behavior. The group didn't need an army of 35,000 moderators to figure this out, and yet Facebook consistently fails to spot the troublemakers that journalists and researchers with less funding and staff seem to keep spotting. As they say: makes you think. Avaaz said that it alerted Facebook to the pages on Friday night. By that time, in aggregate, Avaaz says the top seven pages -- Brian Kolfage, Conservative Values, The Undefeated, We Build the Wall Inc, Citizens of the American Republic, American Joe, and Trump at War -- had collectively gained over 2.45 million followers. In some cases, Bannon and Brian Kolfage, co-conspirator in the "We Build the Wall, Inc." fundraiser/alleged scam, were co-admins. Avaaz campaign director Fadi Quran told Gizmodo that its team identified the Bannon ring by running an "influencer analysis," keeping tabs on frequent guests on Bannon's podcasts and pages affiliated with Bannon's former "We Build the Wall" grift. Avaaz, which is comprised of 40 investigators and data analysts, has kept tabs on habitual misinformers and their coordinated sharing through custom software. They noticed that the Bannon-related pages tended to publish content at the same time and linked to the Populist Press, an even more right-wing Drudge Report copycat trafficking in disproven election fraud claims. The pages avoided warning labels by laundering links through the Populist Press domain rather post the original URLs for stories Facebook had already flagged as misinformation. Avaaz says they'd previously alerted Facebook to a network of 180 Bannon-connected pages and groups which have been sharing misinformation. "We're a small team run with small donations," Quran told Gizmodo. "If we can spot this stuff, a multi-billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees focused on the election and disinformation most certainly can. We are tired of doing their job for them." Quran added that Avaaz has been alerting Facebook to its problems all year. "If 2016 was an accident," Quran added, "2020 has been negligence."

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They moved to exotic locales to work through the pandemic in style. But now tax trouble, breakups and Covid guilt are setting in. From a report: For a certain kind of worker, the pandemic presented a rupture in the space-time-career continuum. Many Americans were stuck, tied down by children or lost income or obligations to take care of the sick. But for those who were unencumbered, with steady jobs that were doable from anywhere, it was a moment to grab destiny and bend employment to their favor. Their logic was as enviable as it was unattainable for everyone else: If you're going to work from home indefinitely, why not make a new home in an exotic place? This tiny cohort gathered their MacBooks, passports and N95 masks and became digital nomads. They Instagrammed their workdays from empty beach resorts in Bali and took Zoom meetings from tricked-out camper vans. They made balcony offices at cheap Tulum Airbnbs and booked state park campsites with Wi-Fi. They were the kind of people who actually applied to those remote worker visa programs heavily advertised by Caribbean countries. And occasionally they were deflated. [...] It turns out there are drawbacks the trend stories and Instagram posts didn't share. Tax things. Red-tape things. Wi-Fi rage things. Closed border things. The kinds of things one might gloss over when making an emotional, quarantine-addled decision to pack up an apartment and book a one-way ticket to Panama or Montreal or Kathmandu. Americans have never been especially good at vacation. Before Covid-19, they were leaving unused hundreds of millions of paid days off. They even created a work-vacation hybrid -- the workation. The idea: Travel to a nice place, work during the day and then, in theory, enjoy the scenery in the off hours. In pandemic times, the digital nomads have simply made workation a permanent state. The bad news is it's the worst of both worlds. They should be enjoying themselves in their new, beautiful surroundings. But they can't enjoy themselves, because work beckons. The anxious self-optimization pingpongs between "Why aren't I living my best life?" and "Why aren't I killing it at work?"

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Micron has announced it's shipping 176-layer TLC NAND flash memory to customers, a move that portends larger, faster and even cheaper SSD drives for all. From a report: The company said its 5th-gen 3D NAND memory should put its density about 40 percent higher than its nearest competitors, which are using 128-layer NAND. Micron said read and write latencies are reduced by 35 percent compared to its 96-layer NAND, and by 25 percent compared its 128-layer NAND. Micron isn't the only NAND memory manufacturer that has 176 layers, but it is the first to start volume shipments. The Micron NAND is TLC, or three-bits per cell, and is said to have 33 percent faster transfer rates, as well as a 35 percent improvement in read and write latencies. And because it's TLC NAND instead of QLC, the new memory should offer better drive endurance, too. The 176-layer design comes from stacking two 88-layer stacks together, which isn't a new thing for Micron. You might think that's a trick, but the end result is still the same: far better density for larger drives. Micron said the new 176-layer NAND is about as thick as one-fifth of a sheet of printer paper, and works out to be as thick its previous 64-layer NAND despite having more than twice as many layers. In the end, this will lead to larger SSDs and potentially cheaper ones, too.

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Apple announced three Macs today that are powered by the company's new M1 chip. They are: MacBook Air: The first Mac that will be powered by the M1 chip is the MacBook Air. According to Apple, the new Air is 3.5x faster with up to 5x graphics performance than the previous generation thanks to the M1 processor. The new MacBook Air doesn't have a fan, so it'll be completely quiet at all times. It has up to 18 hours of total battery life when watching videos or 15 hours when browsing the web. You can get it with up to 2TB of storage and 16GB of memory, with the price still starting at $999. Mac Mini: Additionally, Apple will release an Apple Silicon-powered Mac Mini. It's the same design Apple used for the DTK, but with the M1 processor. The new Mac Mini starts at $699, a drop in the price of $100, and supports up to a 6K display via USB-C Thunderbolt ports with USB-4 support. MacBook Pro: Lastly, Apple is updating the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 chip. Again, Apple touted performance gains in the MacBook Pro with 2.8x CPU gains and 5x GPU gains thanks to the M1 in the MacBook Pro. It keeps its cooling system but now gets 17 hours of battery life when browsing the web, or 20 hours when watching video. Apple kept the price of the MacBook Pro at $1,299 starting price.

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A cryptographic master tool called indistinguishability obfuscation has for years seemed too good to be true. Three researchers have figured out that it can work. Erica Klarreich, reporting for Quanta Magazine: In 2018, Aayush Jain, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, traveled to Japan to give a talk about a powerful cryptographic tool he and his colleagues were developing. As he detailed the team's approach to indistinguishability obfuscation (iO for short), one audience member raised his hand in bewilderment. "But I thought iO doesn't exist?" he said. At the time, such skepticism was widespread. Indistinguishability obfuscation, if it could be built, would be able to hide not just collections of data but the inner workings of a computer program itself, creating a sort of cryptographic master tool from which nearly every other cryptographic protocol could be built. It is "one cryptographic primitive to rule them all," said Boaz Barak of Harvard University. But to many computer scientists, this very power made iO seem too good to be true. Computer scientists set forth candidate versions of iO starting in 2013. But the intense excitement these constructions generated gradually fizzled out, as other researchers figured out how to break their security. As the attacks piled up, "you could see a lot of negative vibes," said Yuval Ishai of the Technion in Haifa, Israel. Researchers wondered, he said, "Who will win: the makers or the breakers?" "There were the people who were the zealots, and they believed in [iO] and kept working on it," said Shafi Goldwasser, director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley. But as the years went by, she said, "there was less and less of those people." Now, Jain -- together with Huijia Lin of the University of Washington and Amit Sahai, Jain's adviser at UCLA -- has planted a flag for the makers. In a paper posted online on August 18, the three researchers show for the first time how to build indistinguishability obfuscation using only "standard" security assumptions. All cryptographic protocols rest on assumptions -- some, such as the famous RSA algorithm, depend on the widely held belief that standard computers will never be able to quickly factor the product of two large prime numbers. A cryptographic protocol is only as secure as its assumptions, and previous attempts at iO were built on untested and ultimately shaky foundations. The new protocol, by contrast, depends on security assumptions that have been widely used and studied in the past. "Barring a really surprising development, these assumptions will stand," Ishai said. While the protocol is far from ready to be deployed in real-world applications, from a theoretical standpoint it provides an instant way to build an array of cryptographic tools that were previously out of reach. For instance, it enables the creation of "deniable" encryption, in which you can plausibly convince an attacker that you sent an entirely different message from the one you really sent, and "functional" encryption, in which you can give chosen users different levels of access to perform computations using your data. The new result should definitively silence the iO skeptics, Ishai said. "Now there will no longer be any doubts about the existence of indistinguishability obfuscation," he said. "It seems like a happy end."

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Apple has introduced the new M1 chip that will power its new generation of Arm-based Macs. It's a 5nm processor, just like the A14 Bionic powering its latest iPhones. From a report: Apple says the new processor will focus on combining power efficiency with performance. It has an eight-core CPU, which Apple says offers the world's best performance per watt of an CPU. Apple says it delivers the same peak performance as a typical laptop CPU at a quarter of the power draw. It says this has four of the world's fastest CPUs cores, paired with four high-efficiency cores. It pairs this with up to an eight-core GPU, which Apple claims offers the world's fastest integrated graphics, and a 16-core Neural Engine. In addition, the M1 processor has a universal memory architecture, a USB 4 controller, media encode and decode engines, and a host of security features. These include hardware-verified secure boot, encryption, and run-time protections.

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An anonymous reader writes: Glaciers in China's bleak Qilian mountains are disappearing at a shocking rate as global warming brings unpredictable change and raises the prospect of crippling, long-term water shortages, scientists say. The largest glacier in the 800-kilometer (500-mile) mountain chain on the arid northeastern edge of the Tibetan plateau has retreated about 450 meters since the 1950s, when researchers set up China's first monitoring station to study it. The 20-square kilometer glacier, known as Laohugou No. 12, is criss-crossed by rivulets of water down its craggy, grit-blown surface. It has shrunk by about 7% since measurements began, with melting accelerating in recent years, scientists say. Equally alarming is the loss of thickness, with about 13 meters (42 feet) of ice disappearing as temperatures have risen, said Qin Xiang, the director at the monitoring station. "The speed that this glacier has been shrinking is really shocking," Qin told Reuters on a recent visit to the spartan station in a frozen, treeless world, where he and a small team of researchers track the changes. The Tibetan plateau is known as the world's Third Pole for the amount of ice long locked in the high-altitude wilderness. But since the 1950s, average temperatures in the area have risen about 1.5 Celsius, Qin said, and with no sign of an end to warming, the outlook is grim for the 2,684 glaciers in the Qilian range. Across the mountains, glacier retreat was 50% faster in 1990-2010 than it was from 1956 to 1990, data from the China Academy of Sciences shows.

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The already battered Arecibo Observatory was hit with another blow on 7 November when one of its 12 main support cables snapped and tore through the radio telescope's main dish. From a report: The incident comes just 3 months after the failure of another cable. Researchers are concerned that increasing stresses on remaining cables could lead to cascading failures and the collapse of the antenna platform that is suspended over the dish. "It's not a pretty picture," says Joanna Rankin, a radio astronomer at the University of Vermont. "This is damn serious." It is "without a doubt" the worst accident to befall the observatory in its long history, says former Director Donald Campbell, now at Cornell University. The nearly 60-year-old telescope, built into a depression in the hills of Puerto Rico, is still prized by researchers. Its huge 307-meter dish -- the largest in the world until overtaken by China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope in 2016 -- makes it very sensitive. And it is one of just a few telescopes with the ability not just to receive radio waves, but also emit them, in the form of radar beams -- which helps researchers track nearby asteroids that could threaten Earth. The observatory suffered damage when Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017. Repairs were continuing in August when a 13-centimeter-thick auxiliary cable, one of six strung between three support towers and the suspended antenna platform, detached from its socket on the platform. The auxiliary cables were added in 1994 to cope with the extra weight of new antennas added in an upgrade. Last month, the University of Central Florida (UCF), which leads a consortium managing the observatory, applied for $10.5 million for emergency repairs from Arecibo's owners, the National Science Foundation (NSF). The latest break -- at 7:39 p.m. local time on a Friday evening -- was in one of the 9-centimeter-thick main support cables. Four such cables run from each of the support towers to the 900-ton platform. Both failed cables were attached to the same tower, so the remaining cables are under significant extra stress. "The forces become scary," says former Arecibo Director Robert Kerr.

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The reopening of restaurants, gyms and hotels carries the highest risk of spreading Covid-19, according to a study that used mobile phone data from 98 million people to model the risks of infection at different locations. From a report: Researchers at Stanford University and Northwestern University used data collected between March and May in cities across the U.S. to map the movement of people. They looked at where they went, how long they stayed, how many others were there and what neighborhoods they were visiting from. They then combined that information with data on the number of cases and how the virus spreads to create infection models. In Chicago, for instance, the study's model predicted that if restaurants were reopened at full capacity, they would generate almost 600,000 new infections, three times as many as with other categories. The study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature, also found that about 10% of the locations examined accounted for 85% of predicted infections. This type of very granular data "shows us where there is vulnerability," said Eric Topol, of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, which wasn't involved in the study. "Then what you need to do is concentrate on the areas that light up."

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