Category: Technica Aquarius

Enlarge / A Ford Explorer sports utility vehicle (SUV) sits for a final inspection at the Ford Motor Co. Chicago Assembly Plant in Chicago on Monday, June 24, 2019. (credit: Daniel Acker / Bloomberg)

Ford’s new Explorer has had a rocky few years. Its rushed initial launch was marred by production problems that resulted in several recalls. When the chip shortage hit, Ford idled the Chicago Assembly Plant for four weeks last July and for another week in February.

Now, the chip shortage has struck the Explorer again, this time in the back seat. Ford has said that it will be shipping Explorers without rear-seat heating and air conditioning controls because the company doesn’t have semiconductors on hand, according to a report in Automotive News.

The rear HVAC can still be controlled by the driver or front-seat passenger, but those being chauffeured around will have to voice their requests rather than tap them in. (Parents may see this as a feature or a bug, depending on their children.)

(credit: Electronic Arts)

Warren Spector’s OtherSide Entertainment stopped work on the highly anticipated System Shock 3 in 2019, Spector confirmed in a recent interview with GamesBeat. The announcement definitively ends hopes that Spector’s studio might still be working with new publisher Tencent on the follow-up to the 1994 PC gaming classic and its 1999 sequel.

The System Shock 3 project was first announced way back in 2015. Spector—known for producing the original System Shock as well as his work on Deus Ex, Thief, and Epic Mickey—made a splash in 2016 when he left academia to return to game development and joined the team at OtherSide Entertainment to work on the planned sequel.

But the project started to show signs of trouble in early 2019, when OtherSide had to buy back the publishing rights to the game from Starbreeze Studios. Though OtherSide was able to show a public demo of System Shock 3 later that year, by early 2020, the entire development team was reportedly “no longer employed” by OtherSide.

Enlarge / Illustration of a swarm of smaller black holes in a gas disk rotating around a giant black hole. (credit: J. Samsing/Neils Bohr Institute)

In 2019, the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration picked up a gravitational wave signal from a black hole merger that proved to be one for the record books. Dubbed “GW190521,” it was the most massive and most distant yet detected, and it produced the most energetic signal detected thus far, showing up in the data as more of a “bang” than the usual “chirp.”

Furthermore, the new black hole resulting from the merger was about 150 times as heavy as our Sun, making GW190521 the first direct observation of an intermediate-mass black hole. Even weirder, the two black holes that merged were locked in an elliptical (rather than circular) orbit, and their axes of spin were tipped far more than usual compared to those orbits.

Physicists love nothing more than to be presented with an intriguing puzzle that doesn’t immediately seem to fit established theory, and GW190521 gave them just that. New theoretical simulations suggest that all those bizarre aspects can be explained by the presence of a third single black hole horning in on the binary system’s final dance to produce a “chaotic tango,” according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. 

Enlarge (credit: Vanced)

YouTube Vanced, a popular mod of the official YouTube Android app, is dead. The project announced its discontinuation over the weekend. The project leaders are being weirdly coy about why the app is shutting down, but The Verge confirmed that a cease-and-desist letter from Google is the reason.

YouTube Vanced, which was created in 2017, is a mod of Google’s Android YouTube app. The developers decompiled Google’s official YouTube app, added additional features, and distributed the resulting code. The primary appeal of Vanced was the ad-blocking feature (the name is YouTube “AdVanced,” but without the “ad”—get it?) and background playback. Along with the copyright infringement of redistributing Google’s proprietary code and infringement of the YouTube trademark, you could consider Vanced a form of piracy since it was essentially a cracked version of the YouTube app that enabled most of the $12-per-month YouTube Premium features for free.

Vanced didn’t just block ads, though; it also added a bunch of community-requested features like a darker dark theme, SponsorBlock integration, and video quality preferences. In addition, Vanced re-enabled YouTube’s removed “Dislike” button and got rid of the YouTube Shorts UI. Team Vanced also released “YouTube Music Vanced,” which made similar changes to the YouTube Music app. Vanced was, of course, not allowed in the Play Store, so an open source “Vanced Manager” app could check for updates, install both Vanced apps, and install a modded version of MicroG so you could log in with your Google account.