Month: January 2022

Enlarge (credit: TCD | Prod.DB | Apple TV+/ | lamy)

In the first episode of the Foundation series on Apple TV, we see a terrorist try to destroy the space elevator used by the Galactic Empire. This seems like a great chance to talk about the physics of space elevators and to consider what would happen if one exploded. (Hint: It wouldn’t be good.)

People like to put stuff beyond the Earth’s atmosphere: It allows us to have weather satellites, a space station, GPS satellites, and even the James Webb Space Telescope. But right now, our only option for getting stuff into space is to strap it to a controlled chemical explosion that we usually call “a rocket.”

Don’t get me wrong, rockets are cool, but they are also expensive and inefficient. Let’s consider what it takes to get a 1-kilogram object into low Earth orbit (LEO). This is around 400 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, about where the International Space Station is. In order to get this object into orbit, you need to accomplish two things. First, you need to lift it up 400 kilometers. But if you only increased the object’s altitude, it wouldn’t be in space for long. It would just fall back to Earth. So, second, in order to keep this thing in LEO, it has to move—really fast.

Enlarge / A court order has led to a longtime Roblox player being banned from the popular game. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Roblox | Shark Fin Studios)

A lawsuit filed by the Roblox Corporation, the operator of one of the most popular online games in the West, concluded last week with a rare order from a US District Court—that a defendant must be permanently banned from an online video game and its associated services.

The dubious honor goes to Benjamin Robert Simon, better known to the Roblox community as Ruben Sim, who had previously received an IP-based Roblox ban after allegedly violating the game’s terms of service. Simon operates a Roblox gameplay and criticism YouTube channel, which currently has 849,000 subscribers.

$150,000, not $1.6 million

The judgment, which came as a stipulated order agreed upon by both the plaintiff and defendant, also requires Simon to pay $150,000 to Roblox. Exactly how that number breaks down based on the suit’s allegations is unclear, but the original suit says that Simon posted a threat in October 2021 that apparently targeted that year’s Roblox Developers Conference. The tweet included a threatening statement without a clear indication of either satire or comedy and said, “San Francisco Police are currently searching for notorious Islamic Extremist [name redacted]. If you see this individual at RDC please call 911 immediately.” The post included a hyperlink to a video titled “SOMEONE BLOW UP ROBLOX NOW,” which had been deleted from YouTube in 2015 but was temporarily re-uploaded, and that video (now once again offline) included direct threats to the Roblox Corporation.

Enlarge / Sam Zeloof completed this homemade computer chip with 1,200 transistors, seen under a magnifying glass, in August 2021. (credit: Sam Kang)

In August, chipmaker Intel revealed new details about its plan to build a “mega-fab” on US soil, a $100 billion factory where 10,000 workers will make a new generation of powerful processors studded with billions of transistors. The same month, 22-year-old Sam Zeloof announced his own semiconductor milestone. It was achieved alone in his family’s New Jersey garage, about 30 miles from where the first transistor was made at Bell Labs in 1947.

With a collection of salvaged and homemade equipment, Zeloof produced a chip with 1,200 transistors. He had sliced up wafers of silicon, patterned them with microscopic designs using ultraviolet light, and dunked them in acid by hand, documenting the process on YouTube and his blog. “Maybe it’s overconfidence, but I have a mentality that another human figured it out, so I can too, even if maybe it takes me longer,” he says.

Enlarge / A tray of prepared syringes for booster vaccinations with Moderna’s vaccine. (credit: Getty | Picture alliance)

Amid the stratospheric rise of the omicron variant, real-world data on the effectiveness of COVID-19 booster doses is now rolling in—and it is only looking up for boosters.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported three studies Friday, two published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) and another, appearing in JAMA, by CDC scientists.

One of the MMWR studies looked at the vaccination status of nearly 10 million COVID-19 cases from 25 state and local health departments. CDC scientists and health officials compared weekly rates of COVID-19 infections between unvaccinated people, fully vaccinated people, and fully vaccinated people who were also boosted. In the month of December, as cases of the ultra-transmissible omicron variant skyrocketed, unvaccinated people were nearly three times more likely to report a case of COVID-19 than people fully vaccinated. Compared with fully vaccinated and boosted people, the unvaccinated were five times more likely to report a case.

Enlarge / Don’t try this at home. Seriously. We mean it. (credit: Anna Efetova)

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have tested a wide range of drugs to see if they inhibit the virus. Most of these tests didn’t end up going anywhere; even the few drugs that did work typically required concentrations that would be impossible to achieve inside human cells. And a few (looking at you, ivermectin and chloroquine) took off with the public despite iffy evidence for effectiveness, seemingly causing nearly as many problems as they would have solved if they actually worked.

Nevertheless, two years on, word of yet another one of these drug experiments caused a bit of a stir, as the drug in question was a cannabinoid. Now, the full data has gone through peer review, and it looks better than you might expect. But the number of caveats is pretty staggering: the effect is small, it hasn’t been tested in patients, the quality assurance of commercial cannabidiol (CBD) products is nearly nonexistent, and—probably most importantly—another cannabinoid blocks the effect entirely.

With that out of the way, on to the data.

Enlarge / The Steam Deck, from Valve. (credit: Valve)

Back in October, Valve laid out the specific review guidelines that a Steam game would have to follow to earn an optional “Deck Verified” badge on its Steam Store page. Now, the results of the first of those verification reviews are starting to leak out, and they’re showing some minor input and interface issues across a handful of games running on Steam Deck.

While the Deck Verified badges have yet to show up on the Steam Store itself, the metadata surrounding the program is already being added to the Steam backend for some titles ahead of the Steam Deck’s planned launch next month, as picked up by services like SteamDB. Of the 86 games with verification review results so far, 41 have at least one issue preventing them from receiving a full “Verified” badge.

First, the good news: Almost all of those un-verified games are still rated as “Playable” under Steam’s guidelines. Only five reviewed games so far have received the dreaded Steam Deck “Unsupported” badge from Valve. Four are virtual reality games, which fail for the simple listed reason that “Steam Deck Does Not Support VR Games.” The fifth, Persona 4 Golden, seems to fail because in-game videos use a problematic Windows Media Player codec that could be difficult to implement through Steam Deck’s Linux Proton compatibility layer. “Valve is still working on adding support for this game on Steam Deck,” the game’s metadata says.