Enlarge / Artist's conception of the state of the Earth during its global glaciations. (credit: NASA )

Earth has gone through many geologic phases, but it did have one striking period of stasis: Our planet experienced a tropical environment where algae and single-celled organisms flourished for almost 2 billion years. Then things changed drastically as the planet was plunged into a deep freeze.

It was previously unclear when Earth became a gargantuan freezer. Now, University College London researchers have found evidence in an outcrop of rocks in Scotland, known as the Port Askaig Formation, that show evidence of the transition from a tropical Earth to a frozen one 717 million years ago. This marks the onset of the Sturtian glaciation and would be the first of two " snowball Earth " events during which much of the planet’s surface was covered in ice. It is thought that multicellular life began to emerge after Earth thawed.

Found in the Scottish islands known as the Garvellachs, this outcrop within the Port Askaig Formation is unique because it offers the first conclusive evidence of when a tropical Earth froze over—underlying layers that are a timeline from a warmer era to a frigid one. Other rocks that formed during the same time period in other parts of the world lack this transitional evidence because ancient glaciers most likely scraped it off.

Enlarge / The state of New York says that this guy is the "assman," not me. Show him the butt ads! (credit: Seinfeld)

According to my research, everyone has a butt.

But that doesn't mean, when I'm imbibing my morning cuppa and reading up on the recent presidential debate, that I want to see an ad showing an illustrated derrière with a bar of soap clenched firmly between its two ripe cheeks.

The ad that finally broke me.

Yet there it was, a riotous rump residing right in the middle of a New York Times article this week, causing me to reflect on just how far the Gray Lady has stooped to pick up those ad dollars lying in the gutter.

Enlarge / Union members cheer during a news conference following a vote count on the union contract at the IAM District 751 Main Union Hall in Seattle, Washington, US, on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg )

More than 33,000 unionized Boeing workers went on strike Friday, rejecting what they say were unfair terms of a deal the embattled aerospace company tentatively reached with their union .

The rejected deal tried and failed to win over workers by offering a 25 percent wage increase and promised to build Boeing's next jet in the Puget Sound region in Washington, which Boeing claimed offered "job security for generations to come."

But after International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) District 751 president Jon Holden urged the union to accept the deal—which Boeing said was the "largest-ever general wage increase" in the company's history— hundreds of Boeing employees immediately began resisting ahead of a Thursday vote that ultimately doomed the deal.

Enlarge / Sorry about all the black space in the lower-right corner. Nerdfetch does not make good use of the space it's given—unlike the Asahi install on this MacBook. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Almost nobody truly needed Neofetch, but the people who did use it? They really liked it.

Neofetch, run from a terminal, displayed key system information alongside an ASCII-art image of the operating system or distribution running on that system. You knew most of this data, but if you're taking a screenshot of your system, it looked cool and conveyed a lot of data in a small space. "The overall purpose of Neofetch is to be used in screen-shots of your system," wrote Neofetch's creator, Dylan Araps, on its Github repository . "Neofetch shows the information other people want to see."

Neofetch did that, providing cool screenshots and proof-of-life images across nearly 150 OS versions until late April. The last update to the tool was made three years before that, and Araps' Github profile now contains a rather succinct coda: "Have taken up farming." Araps joins " going to a commune in Vermont " and " I now make furniture out of wood " in the pantheon of programmers who do not just leave the field but flee it into another realm entirely.

Enlarge / Soon you'll be able to stream games and video for free on United flights. (credit: United)

United Airlines announced this morning that it is giving its in-flight Internet access an upgrade. It has signed a deal with Starlink to deliver SpaceX's satellite-based service to all its aircraft, a process that will start in 2025. And the good news for passengers is that the in-flight Wi-Fi will be free of charge.

The flying experience as it relates to consumer technology has come a very long way in the two-and-a-bit decades that Ars has been publishing. At the turn of the century, even having a power socket in your seat was a long shot. Laptop batteries didn't last that long, either—usually less than the runtime of whatever DVD I hoped to distract myself with, if memory serves.

Bring a spare battery and that might double, but it helped to have a book or magazine to read.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Dan Kitwood )

Elon Musk has lambasted Australia’s government as “fascists” over proposed laws that could levy substantial fines on social media companies if they fail to comply with rules to combat the spread of disinformation and online scams.

The billionaire owner of social media site X posted the word “fascists” on Friday in response to the bill, which would strengthen the Australian media regulator’s ability to hold companies responsible for the content on their platforms and levy potential fines of up to 5 percent of global revenue. The bill, which was proposed this week, has yet to be passed.

Musk’s comments drew rebukes from senior Australian politicians, with Stephen Jones, Australia’s finance minister, telling national broadcaster ABC that it was “crackpot stuff” and the legislation was a matter of sovereignty.

Enlarge (credit: BirdImages )

It seems like common sense that being smart should increase the chances of survival in wild animals. Yet for a long time, scientists couldn’t demonstrate that because it was unclear how to tell exactly if a lion or a crocodile or a mountain chickadee was actually smart or not. Our best shots, so far, were looking at indirect metrics like brain size or doing lab tests of various cognitive skills such as reversal learning, an ability that can help an animal adapt to a changing environment .

But a new, large-scale study on wild mountain chickadees, led by Joseph Welklin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Nevada, showed that neither brain size nor reversal learning skills were correlated with survival. What mattered most for chickadees, small birds that save stashes of food, was simply remembering where they cached all their food. A chickadee didn’t need to be a genius to survive; it just needed to be good at its job.

Testing bird brains

“Chickadees cache one food item in one location, and they do this across a big area. They can have tens of thousands of caches. They do this in the fall and then, in the winter, they use a special kind of spatial memory to find those caches and retrieve the food. They are little birds, weight is like 12 grams, and they need to eat almost all the time. If they don’t eat for a few hours, they die,” explains Vladimir Pravosudov, an ornithologist at the University of Nevada and senior co-author of the study.

Enlarge / Landspace's reusable rocket test vehicle lifts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Wednesday, September 11, 2024. (credit: Landspace )

Welcome to Edition 7.11 of the Rocket Report! Outside of companies owned by American billionaires, the most imminent advancements in reusable rockets are coming from China's quasi-commercial launch industry. This industry is no longer nascent. After initially relying on solid-fueled rocket motors apparently derived from Chinese military missiles, China's privately funded launch firms are testing larger launchers, with varying degrees of success, and now performing hop tests reminiscent of SpaceX's Grasshopper and F9R Dev1 programs more than a decade ago.

As always, we welcome reader submissions . 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.

Landspace hops closer to a reusable rocket. Chinese private space startup Landspace has completed a 10-kilometer (33,000-foot) vertical takeoff and vertical landing test on its Zhuque-3 (ZQ-3) reusable rocket testbed, including a mid-flight engine reignition at near supersonic conditions, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports . The 18.3-meter (60-foot) vehicle took off from the Jiuquan launch base in northwestern China, ascended to 10,002 meters, and then made a vertical descent and achieved an on-target propulsive landing 3.2 kilometers (2 miles) from the launch pad. Notably, the rocket's methane-fueled variable thrust engine intentionally shutdown in flight, then reignited for descent, as engines would operate on future full-scale booster flybacks. The test booster used grid fins and cold gas thrusters to control itself when its main engine was dormant, according to Landspace.

Enlarge / The name placard for Dr. Ralph de la Torre, founder and chief executive officer of Steward Health Care System, in front of an empty seat during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing in Washington, DC, on Thursday, September 12, 2024. (credit: Getty | Ting Shen )

The CEO of a failed hospital system who was paid hundreds of millions of dollars while patients were allegedly "killed and maimed" in his resource-starved and rotting facilities, was a no-show at a Senate hearing on Thursday—despite a bipartisan subpoena compelling him to appear.

Lawyers for Ralph de la Torre—the Harvard University-trained cardiac surgeon who took over the Steward Health Care System in 2020—told senators in a letter last week that he was unable to testify at the hearing. Despite previously agreeing to the hearing, de la Torre and his lawyers argued that a federal court order stemming from Steward's bankruptcy case, filed in May, prevented him from discussing anything amid reorganization and settlement efforts.

But that argument was found to be without merit by the Senate committee that issued the subpoena in July—the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), chaired by Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). In comments to the Associated Press Wednesday , Sanders said there were plenty of topics he could have safely discussed.