Are superheroes and supervillains the product of their childhood experiences? Not if they belong to the Marvel Cinematic Extended Universe or DC Universe, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. Canadian researchers watched many hours of those movies and looked at which characters suffered considerable childhood trauma. They concluded that those traumatic experiences were not significant factors in whether those characters turned out to be heroes or villains.

Prior studies have looked at the portrayal of trauma in superheroes, most notably the murder of Batman's parents and Spider-Man's uncle, as well as the destruction of Superman's home planet, Krypton. There has also been research on children sustaining injuries while pretending to be superheroes, as well as on the potential for superhero themes to help children overcome trauma and build self-esteem.

According to co-author Jennifer Jackson of the University of Calgary in Canada, two nursing students (since graduated) came up with the idea during a lab meeting to look at adverse childhood experiences and superheroes. It might seem a bit frivolous as a topic, but Jackson pointed out that Marvel and DC films reach audiences of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. "We also know that things we see in films and other media affects life in the real world," she said. "This influence could be used as a positive factor when supporting children's mental health and wellbeing. There may be shame or fear associated with some of the ACEs, and superheroes may be an effective ice breaker when broaching some difficult topics."

Read full article

Comments

Just a few days after more than 700 million new users flooded RedNote—which Time noted is "the most apolitical social platform in China"—rumors began swirling that RedNote may soon start segregating American users and other foreign IPs from the app's Chinese users.

In the "TikTokCringe" subreddit, a video from a RedNote user with red eyes, presumably swollen from tears, suggested that Americans had possibly ruined the app for Chinese Americans who rely on RedNote to stay current on Chinese news and culture.

"RedNote or Xiaohongshu released an update in the greater China region with the function to separate out foreign IPs, and there are now talks of moving all foreign IPs to a separate server and having a different IP for those who are in the greater China area," the Reddit poster said. "I know through VPNs and other ways, people are still able to access the app, but essentially this is gonna kill the app for Chinese Americans who actually use the app to connect with Chinese content, Chinese language, Chinese culture."

Read full article

Comments

AT&T has stopped offering its 5G home Internet service in New York instead of complying with a new state law that requires ISPs to offer $15 or $20 plans to people with low incomes.

The decision was reported yesterday by CNET and confirmed by AT&T in a statement provided to Ars today. "While we are committed to providing reliable and affordable Internet service to customers across the country, New York's broadband law imposes harmful rate regulations that make it uneconomical for AT&T to invest in and expand our broadband infrastructure in the state," AT&T said. "As a result, effective January 15, 2025, we will no longer be able to offer AT&T Internet Air, our fixed-wireless Internet service, to New York customers."

New York started enforcing its Affordable Broadband Act yesterday after a legal battle of nearly four years. Broadband lobby groups convinced a federal judge to block the law in 2021, but a US appeals court reversed the ruling in April 2024, and the Supreme Court decided not to hear the case last month.

Read full article

Comments

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Wednesday and deployed two commercial lunar landers on separate trajectories to reach the Moon in the next few months.

The mission began with a middle-of-the-night launch from Kennedy at 1:11 am EST (06:11 UTC) Wednesday. It took about an hour and a half for the Falcon 9 rocket to release both payloads into two slightly different orbits, ranging up to 200,000 and 225,000 miles (322,000 and 362,000 kilometers) from Earth.

The two robotic lunar landers—one from Firefly Aerospace based near Austin, Texas, and another from the Japanese space company ispace—will use their own small engines for the final maneuvers required to enter orbit around the Moon in the coming months.

Read full article

Comments

Pension funds are dipping their toes into buying bitcoin, in a sign that even typically staid corners of finance are finding it hard to ignore the potential outsized returns from cryptocurrencies.

Pension schemes for the states of Wisconsin and Michigan are among the top holders of US stock market funds devoted to crypto, while some pension fund managers in the UK and Australia have also made small allocations in recent months to bitcoin using funds or derivatives.

Advisers say the surge in bitcoin last year, which more than doubled to touch $100,000, has spurred the interest of conservative trustees.

Read full article

Comments

Intel's Arc B580 graphics cards have been its best-reviewed to date, maintaining the aggressive pricing of the old A-series Arc cards with fewer driver bugs, fewer weird performance outliers, and fewer caveats all around.

And this appears to be translating to retail success—the B580 is sold out across the board and difficult to find at its $249 MSRP. It's hard to tell if this is because demand has been good or supply was low (Intel says it has been restocking "weekly," for what that's worth). But regardless, there's clearly been some pent-up demand for an inexpensive-but-competent entry-level graphics card with decent ray-tracing performance and power efficiency and more than 8GB of RAM.

The Arc B570 is a less-powerful, less-interesting card than the B580, with fewer of Intel's Xe-cores, less memory bandwidth, and 10GB of RAM instead of 12GB. But it offers performance very similar to the RTX 4060 for $80 less—at least, if Intel and its partners can keep it in stock at that price—which makes it a dramatically more interesting budget option than $200-ish cards like the GeForce RTX 3050 or Radeon RX 6600.

Read full article

Comments

Making the seventh Civilization game is a tall order. With six prior entries, each with a different flavor, it's challenging to create a unique identity to get people to buy it while ensuring it’s familiar enough that it doesn’t drive longtime fans away.

This week, I spent 15 hours playing Civilization VII—which is slated for release next month—through two of its three ages: Antiquity and Exploration. That’s enough time to know that this is the most radical overhaul yet in a single new release without any expansions.

Regardless, my initial impressions are that this is also a return to form for the series. Like many others, I had gripes about Civilization VI. To be clear, VII isn’t a reset to pre-VI times; some concepts introduced in VI (like the hex-based city district system) are revisited and refined here.

Read full article

Comments

After months and years of rumors and official hints, Nintendo has finally pulled back the curtain on the Switch 2 with a first-look trailer (and sparse promo website) highlighting many small changes from the old Switch.

The short trailer shows off the Switch 2's larger tablet and screen, and a slightly more rounded edge on the top and bottom. The new system also sports an additional USB-C port on the top (next to a headphone jack) and a wider, U-shaped kickstand along the backside that can support the system at a number of wider angles.

The trailer also shows off black Joy-Cons that are significantly larger than those on the original Switch, with colored accents behind the joystick itself. An extended, colored Joy-Con "rail" on the inner edge features wider shoulder buttons and a new connector in the center. Rather than sliding in vertically, like the plastic rail on the Switch Joy-Cons, the controllers on the Switch 2 snap in horizontally with what appears to be a magnetic connection, and disconnects with the aid of a horizontal lever to the side of the shoulder buttons.

Read full article

Comments

For the past seven months—and likely longer—an industry-wide standard that protects Windows devices from firmware infections could be bypassed using a simple technique. On Tuesday, Microsoft finally patched the vulnerability. The status of Linux systems is still unclear.

Tracked as CVE-2024-7344, the vulnerability made it possible for attackers who had already gained privileged access to a device to run malicious firmware during bootup. These types of attacks can be particularly pernicious because infections hide inside the firmware that runs at an early stage, before even Windows or Linux has loaded. This strategic position allows the malware to evade defenses installed by the OS and gives it the ability to survive even after hard drives have been reformatted. From then on, the resulting "bootkit" controls the operating system start.

In place since 2012, Secure Boot is designed to prevent these types of attacks by creating a chain-of-trust linking each file that gets loaded. Each time a device boots, Secure Boot verifies that each firmware component is digitally signed before it’s allowed to run. It then checks the OS bootloader's digital signature to ensure that it's trusted by the Secure Boot policy and hasn't been tampered with. Secure Boot is built into the UEFI—short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface—the successor to the BIOS that’s responsible for booting modern Windows and Linux devices.

Read full article

Comments

Electric vehicle chargers are increasingly a target of vandals, often in search of copper. "Even at our headquarter site here in Campbell, in Silicon Valley, we've had our site vandalized twice," said Rick Wilmer, CEO of ChargePoint. His customers are starting to get fed up with the problem, too, and so Wilmer has had the company hard at work on a solution: an uncuttable cable, which should be ready to deploy by early summer.

"I literally got so frustrated ... I was at home in my own workshop, building prototypes and taking all my nastiest tools to them, to try and cut them, to see what we could come up with," Wilmer told me. It's a simple idea, involving hardened steel and "some other polymer materials that are just really hard to cut through," Wilmer said.

As well as making cables for its own chargers, ChargePoint plans to license its invention to others in the industry. "So we've collaborated with a few [cable vendors] to build these cables... and we can refer anyone that's interested to those vendors and give [them] permission to build cables with this technology for someone other than us," Wilmer said.

Read full article

Comments

Yesterday was Wikipedia Day, celebrating the first edit made to the online encyclopedia on January 15, 2001. It's a tricky kind of celebration because, for many of us, every day is a Wikipedia Day. Scanning a new Wikipedia tab can feel like turning on a faucet, using a resource that has seemingly always been there and dispensed evenly, almost magically, from the Internet pipes.

But that's not where Wikipedia comes from. It comes from editors, who are volunteers that add missing topics, update pages when new things happen, and settle debates ranging from grammar ticks to deep philosophy. Author Stephen Harrison has written about these people for Slate, WIRED, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Now, he's exploring the distinctive lives, interests, and conflicts of this tribe in a fiction tome, The Editors.

The Editors follows Morgan Wentworth, a recently laid-off journalist who scopes out a freelance story at a global conference for the book's Wiki stand-in, Infopendium. Wentworth sees the breadth of ages, personalities, and motivations among the editors and comes to appreciate their dedication. Then, a hacker breaks in, posts a cryptic message, and triggers Wentworth's expanding investigation into a global struggle over truth and information.

Read full article

Comments

Early on Thursday morning, a Saturn V-sized rocket ignited its seven main engines, a prelude to lifting off from Earth.

But then, the New Glenn rocket didn't move.

And still, the engines produced their blue flame, furiously burning away methane.

Read full article

Comments

Lots of startups use Google's productivity suite, known as Workspace, to handle email, documents, and other back-office matters. Relatedly, lots of business-minded webapps use Google's OAuth, i.e. "Sign in with Google." It's a low-friction feedback loop—up until the startup fails, the domain goes up for sale, and somebody forgot to close down all the Google stuff.

Dylan Ayrey, of Truffle Security Co., suggests in a report that this problem is more serious than anyone, especially Google, is acknowledging. Many startups make the critical mistake of not properly closing their accounts—on both Google and other web-based apps—before letting their domains expire.

Given the number of people working for tech startups (6 million), the failure rate of said startups (90 percent), their usage of Google Workspaces (50 percent, all by Ayrey's numbers), and the speed at which startups tend to fall apart, there are a lot of Google-auth-connected domains up for sale at any time. That would not be an inherent problem, except that, as Ayrey shows, buying a domain with a still-active Google account can let you re-activate the Google accounts for former employees.

Read full article

Comments

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments that could determine if a Texas age-gating law preventing kids from accessing pornography online is overly burdensome for adults. A ruling against Texas could put an end to allegedly invasive age-verification laws in nearly 20 states.

A decision isn't expected until summer 2025, so it's too soon to say which way the court is leaning.

The question before the court is whether the 5th Circuit was right to stay a preliminary injunction that had previously been blocking Texas from enforcing the law or whether that decision should be reversed and remanded based on the level of constitutional scrutiny that the 5th Circuit applied.

Read full article

Comments

Daredevil is among my favorite stories in the Netflix Defenders universe—along with Jessica Jones—in large part because Wilson Fisk (aka Kingpin, played to perfection by Vincent D'Onofrio), was such an incredibly complex and even occasionally sympathetic villain in the first and second seasons. I'm far from alone in this assessment, which explains why it was such a blow to fans when Netflix canceled the critically acclaimed Daredevil (and the rest of its Defenders series) in 2018, despite the showrunners' plans for a fourth season.

Charlie Cox's titular vigilante hero has since made a couple of cameos in other Marvel projects, most notably as a one-night stand for Tatiana Maslany's She-Hulk in 2022. That kept hope alive that Daredevil might be revived and/or re-imagined. The hope has paid off because Marvel Studios just released a trailer for the new nine-episode series Daredevil: Born Again. And the studio has already confirmed a second season as part of the MCU's Phase Five.

D'Onofrio's Fisk (who also appeared in the limited series Echo and Hawkeye) is back, of course. Per the official premise: "Murdock, a blind lawyer with heightened abilities, is fighting for justice through his bustling law firm, while former mob boss Wilson Fisk pursues his own political endeavors in New York. When their past identities begin to emerge, both men find themselves on an inevitable collision course."

Read full article

Comments

A Washington-based launch company announced Wednesday that it has raised $260 million in Series C funding, a significant capital raise at a time when it has become more difficult for some space companies to attract funding.

"The market is tough, but I think what we’re doing is poised to go straight to the end state of the industry, and I think investors recognize that," said Andy Lapsa, Stoke Space's co-founder and chief executive officer, in an interview with Ars after the announcement.

By "end state of the industry," Lapsa means that Stoke is developing a fully reusable medium-lift rocket named Nova. The vehicle's first stage will land vertically, similarly to a Falcon 9 rocket, and the second stage, which has a novel metallic heat shield and engine design, will also land back on Earth.

Read full article

Comments

Here at Ars, we're suckers for stories about hackers getting Doom running on everything from CAPTCHA robot checks and Windows' notepad.exe to AI hallucinations and fluorescing gut bacteria. Despite all that experience, we were still thrown for a loop by a recent demonstration of Doom running in the usually static confines of a PDF file.

On the Github page for the quixotic project, coder ading2210 discusses how Adobe Acrobat included some robust support for JavaScript in the PDF file format. That JS coding support—which dates back decades and is still fully documented in Adobe's official PDF specs—is currently implemented in a more limited, more secure form as part of PDFium, the built-in PDF-rendering engine of Chromium-based browsers.

In the past, hackers have used this little-known Adobe feature to code simple games like Breakout and Tetris into PDF documents. But ading220 went further, recompiling a streamlined fork of Doom's open source code using an old version of Emscripten that outputs optimized asm.js code.

Read full article

Comments

Tires might be one of the more prosaic parts of a car, but they are undoubtedly among the most important. Bench racers might obsess about powertrain specs, and average consumers mostly want to know that there's wireless charging for their phones, but it's the tires that actually make contact with the road. Without them, no one is going anywhere. At least not very far.

In the past, tires have been considered somewhat mysterious, with secret blends of rubber, carbon, and other stuff combined with clever arrangements of belts and wires to hold the whole thing together as it rotates faster and faster without flying apart. These days, we know an awful lot about how tires work. Or at least tire companies like Goodyear do, having amassed enough testing data to be able to simulate them accurately enough to shave months off a development schedule.

In fact, the use of simulation in tire research and development has quite a long history. Chris Helsel, who is now Goodyear's CTO, joined the company back in 1996; he was hired as part of a tiny team doing computer tire simulation. "At Goodyear in '96, it felt like almost late to the party in terms of doing what we call finite element analysis, which is basically breaking a large structure down into little parts," Helsel said.

Read full article

Comments

The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Elon Musk yesterday over his late disclosure of a Twitter stock purchase in early 2022. Before Musk bought the whole company, he purchased a 9 percent stake in Twitter and failed to disclose it within 10 days as required under US law.

"Defendant Elon Musk failed to timely file with the SEC a beneficial ownership report disclosing his acquisition of more than five percent of the outstanding shares of Twitter's common stock in March 2022, in violation of the federal securities laws," said the SEC lawsuit in US District Court for the District of Columbia. "As a result, Musk was able to continue purchasing shares at artificially low prices, allowing him to underpay by at least $150 million for shares he purchased after his beneficial ownership report was due."

Twitter's stock price rose 27 percent once Musk belatedly disclosed his stake, the lawsuit said. "During the period that Musk was required to publicly disclose his beneficial ownership but had failed to do so, he spent more than $500 million purchasing additional shares of Twitter common stock," it said.

Read full article

Comments

It has been a few years since AI began successfully tackling the challenge of predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins, complex molecules that are essential for all life. Next-generation tools are now available, and the Nobel Prizes have been handed out. But people not involved in biology can be forgiven for asking whether any of it can actually make a difference.

A nice example of how the tools can be put to use is being released in Nature on Wednesday. A team that includes the University of Washington's David Baker, who picked up his Nobel in Stockholm last month, used software tools to design completely new proteins that are able to inhibit some of the toxins in snake venom. While not entirely successful, the work shows how the new software tools can let researchers tackle challenges that would otherwise be difficult or impossible.

Blocking venom

Snake venom includes a complicated mix of toxins, most of them proteins, that engage in a multi-front assault on anything unfortunate enough to get bitten. Right now, the primary treatment is to use a mix of antibodies that bind to these toxins, produced by injecting sub-lethal amounts of venom proteins into animals. But antivenon treatments tend to require refrigeration, and even then, they have a short shelf life. Ensuring a steady supply also means regularly injecting new animals and purifying more antibodies from them.

Read full article

Comments