Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

Starlink said it is complying with Brazil's order to block Elon Musk's X platform, backtracking from its earlier position that it would not block X until Brazilian officials released Starlink's frozen assets. In an update on Tuesday afternoon , Starlink said it is blocking X while continuing to fight the asset freeze in court.

"Following last week's order from [Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes] that froze Starlink's finances and prevents Starlink from conducting financial transactions in Brazil, we immediately initiated legal proceedings in the Brazilian Supreme Court explaining the gross illegality of this order and asking the Court to unfreeze our assets," SpaceX's satellite broadband division said. "Regardless of the illegal treatment of Starlink in freezing of our assets, we are complying with the order to block access to X in Brazil. We continue to pursue all legal avenues, as are others who agree that @alexandre's recent orders violate the Brazilian constitution."

Starlink previously said that a Brazilian court order froze its assets "based on an unfounded determination that Starlink should be responsible for the fines levied—unconstitutionally—against X." An Associated Press article said that "de Moraes froze Starlink's accounts last week as a means to compel it to cover X's fines that already exceeded $3 million, reasoning that the two companies are part of the same economic group."

Enlarge / View of the Las Gobas cave site. (credit: Miguel Sotomayor via Getty )

In a new study , we have sequenced DNA from a Christian community in medieval Spain that lived in artificial caves carved into a rocky outcrop.

This is one of several medieval cave communities known to have lived on the Iberian Peninsula—which includes both Portugal and Spain. Why these groups favored caves over more conventional village dwellings is a subject of longstanding debate for archaeologists. While it may be tempting to speculate about hermits or religious groups, there’s scant evidence to support such theories.

Our study, published in Science Advances, explores the possibilities, adding genetic analysis to what we know about the physical remains of people from the site’s cemetery. DNA was able to shed light on the ancestry of this community, their relationships to each other and the diseases that afflicted them.

Enlarge / Refrigerated delivery with an E-Transit is now feasible, as the onboard power is now available while the van is in motion. (credit: Ford)

America's tradespeople have steadily been getting more van-curious over the years, helped no doubt by Ford beginning local production of the already Euro-popular Transit in Kansas City in 2014. In 2022 Ford debuted the E-Transit , which has been steadily growing in sales over the past few quarters. Now the Blue Oval has started deliveries of the model-year 2024 E-Transit, and there are some worthwhile improvements compared to the MY23 van.

The opprobrium that is now starting to stick to supersized pickup trucks has mostly ignored the humble van. It's contradictory, on the face of it; even a low-roof Transit takes up more volume on the road than most pickups. But then, there aren't leather-and-chrome special edition Transit vans driven more as commuter cars or weekend toys like there are pickups—at least for now.

EV vans ought to be even more immune, for they maintain their working class credentials and burnish them with a side helping of environmentalism. For example, Ford says that data from its telematics show that since its introduction in 2022 until the end of Q2 2024, E-Transit customers in the US and Canada had avoided burning more than 3 million gallons of gas (11.3 million L) and reduced their output of CO ₂ by 25 million kg.

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Windows-on-Arm is finally just about good enough to serve as your main PC, thanks to a combination of long-awaited Snapdragon X-series silicon from Qualcomm, Arm-specific improvements in the Windows 11 24H2 update, and third-party software developers that are slowly but surely putting out Arm-native versions of their most popular apps.

So far, those Snapdragon X chips have been confined mostly to $1,000-and-up premium PCs like the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop. But Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon has said that he wants to get better hardware into midrange laptops in the $700 range, and today the company took a concrete step toward making that happen: a new version of the Snapdragon X with 8 CPU cores instead of 10, but the same Oryon CPU architecture (a neural processing unit [NPU] that still meets Microsoft's requirements for Copilot+ PCs ) and the same Snapdragon X Plus branding as the faster 10-core versions.

There are two separate versions of the 8-core Snapdragon X Plus. The X1P-46-100 version allows its CPU to boost up to 4.0 GHz for single-core tasks and has a GPU capable of 2.1 TFLOPS of performance (compared to 3.8 for the 10-core X plus, and 4.6 for the fastest Snapdragon X Elite variants). The X1P-42-100 version only boosts up to 3.4 GHz in single-core mode and has a 1.7 TFLOPS GPU. All of Qualcomm's NPUs are the same, offering 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS).

Enlarge / The Terran 1 rocket made its only flight (a beautiful one) in March 2023. (credit: Relativity Space/John Kraus)

A splashy California-based launch company named Relativity Space shared a photo of sleek-looking rocket hardware on its social media channels last week. The image featured an impressively large payload fairing, which protects satellites on the ride into space.

"Time to take a look at Terran R’s payload envelope," the company said, calling attention to three people standing to the left of the tall fairing.

Such an anodyne post seems an unlikely candidate to spark an analysis of what is really happening at Relativity Space, but that’s exactly what happened. Less than an hour after its publication, a source I've been talking to about Relativity for a while contacted me again.

Enlarge / A cow grazes in a field at a dairy farm on April 26, 2024, in Petaluma, California. (credit: Getty | Justin Sullivan )

The outbreak of H5N1 bird flu in US dairy cows has now spread to three herds in California, the largest milk-producing state in the country with around 1.7 million dairy cows, federal and state health officials have confirmed .

Fourteen states and 197 herds have now been affected by the unprecedented outbreak in dairy cows, which was first confirmed by federal health officials on March 25.

In a statement, the secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, Karen Ross, said the spread of the virus to California was not unexpected. "We have been preparing for this possibility since earlier this year when [Highly pathogenic avian influenza or HPAI] detections were confirmed at dairy farms in other states," Ross said. "Our extensive experience with HPAI in poultry has given us ample preparation and expertise to address this incident, with workers’ health and public health as our top priorities."

Enlarge (credit: Disney)

Disney-owned channels have been blacked out on DirecTV for the past two days because of a contract dispute, with both companies claiming publicly that they aren't willing to budge much from their negotiating positions. Until it's resolved, DirecTV subscribers won't have access to ABC, ESPN, and other Disney channels.

While there have been many contentious contract negotiations between TV providers and programmers, this one is "not a run-of-the-mill dispute," DirecTV CFO Ray Carpenter said today in a call with reporters and analysts, according to The Hollywood Reporter . "This is not the kind of dispute where we're haggling over percentage points on a rate. This is really about changing the model in a way that gives everyone confidence that this industry can survive."

Carpenter was quoted as saying that DirecTV will fight Disney "as long as it needs to" and accused Disney of timing the blackout before big sporting events "to put the most pain and disruption on our customers." Carpenter also said DirecTV doesn't "have any dates drawn in the sand" and is "not playing a short-term game," according to Variety .

Enlarge / Washington State University scientists conducted batting cage tests of wood and metal bats with young players. (credit: YouTube/Baseball Bat Bros. )

There's long been a debate in baseball circles about the respective benefits and drawbacks of using wood bats versus metal bats . However, there are relatively few scientific studies on the topic that focus specifically on young athletes, who are most likely to use metal bats. Scientists at Washington State University (WSU) conducted their own tests of wood and metal bats with young players. They found that while there are indeed performance differences between wooden and metal bats, a batter's skill is still the biggest factor affecting how fast the ball comes off the bat, according to a new paper published in the Journal of Sports Engineering and Technology.

According to physicist and acoustician Daniel Russell of Penn State University—who was not involved in the study but has a long-standing interest in the physics of baseball ever since his faculty days at Kettering University in Michigan—metal bats were first introduced in 1974 and soon dominated NCAA college baseball, youth baseball, and adult amateur softball. Those programs liked the metal bats because they were less likely to break than traditional wooden bats, reducing costs.

Players liked them because it can be easier to control metal bats and swing faster, as the center of mass is closer to the balance point in the bat's handle, resulting in a lower moment of inertia (or "swing weight"). A faster swing doesn't mean that a hit ball will travel faster, however, since the lower moment of inertia is countered by a decreased collision efficiency. Metal bats are also more forgiving if players happen to hit the ball away from the proverbial "sweet spot" of the bat. (The definition of the sweet spot is a bit fuzzy because it is sometimes defined in different ways, but it's commonly understood to be the area on the bat's barrel that results in the highest batted ball speeds.)

Enlarge / An ABC handout promotional image for "AI and the Future of Us: An Oprah Winfrey Special." (credit: ABC )

On Thursday, ABC announced an upcoming TV special titled, "AI and the Future of Us: An Oprah Winfrey Special." The one-hour show, set to air on September 12, aims to explore AI's impact on daily life and will feature interviews with figures in the tech industry, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Bill Gates. Soon after the announcement, some AI critics began questioning the guest list and the framing of the show in general.

" Sure is nice of Oprah to host this extended sales pitch for the generative AI industry at a moment when its fortunes are flagging and the AI bubble is threatening to burst ," tweeted author Brian Merchant, who frequently criticizes generative AI technology in op-eds, social media, and through his "Blood in the Machine" AI newsletter.

"The way the experts who are not experts are presented as such what a train wreck," replied artist Karla Ortiz, who is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against several AI companies. "There’s still PLENTY of time to get actual experts and have a better discussion on this because yikes."