An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Google employees have no legal right to protest the company's choice of clients, the internet giant told a judge weighing the U.S. government's allegations that its firings of activists violated the National Labor Relations Act. "Even if Google had, for the sake of argument, terminated the employees for their protest activities -- for protesting their choice of customers -- this would not violate the Act," Google's attorney Al Latham said in his opening statement Tuesday at a labor board trial. National Labor Relations Board prosecutors have accused the Alphabet Inc. unit of violating federal law by illegally firing five employees for their activism. Three of those workers' claims had originally been dismissed under President Donald Trump, because agency prosecutors concluded that their opposition to the company collaborating with immigration enforcement wasn't legally protected, according to their lawyer. But that decision was reversed after President Joe Biden fired and replaced the labor board's general counsel.

Google has been roiled over the past four years by a wave of activism by employees challenging management over issues including treatment of sub-contracted staff, handling of sexual harassment, and a contract with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which some of the fired workers accessed internal information about and circulated a petition against. Google has denied wrongdoing, saying in a Monday statement that it encourages "open discussion and debate" but terminated staff in response to violations of its data security policies. "Google terminated these employees not because of their protest as such, but because in the pursuit of their protest, they accessed highly confidential information that they had no right to access," its attorney told the judge Tuesday.

Federal labor law prohibits retaliating against employees for collective action related to their working conditions, but the exact scope of that protection has been debated for decades. Biden's appointees have signaled they interpret the scope of what that covers much more broadly than their Trump-era predecessors. Latham said he isn't aware of any case in the labor board's eight decades of existence in which it has held "an employer's choice of customer" to be an issue workers have a right to protest. "What we have here is a protest that does not seek to improve employees' terms and conditions of employment," but rather "a purely political protest that sought to use Google's government contracts, or potential government contracts, as leverage," he said.

Playdate, the one-bit gaming system with an analog crank, will be relatively easy to fix if you ever need to replace its battery or buttons. Ars Technica reports the findings from iFixit's teardown: The most interesting findings: The Playdate's signature crank uses a Hall effect sensor rather than a spring or another kind of wear-out-able physical mechanism, so it shouldn't suffer from drift over time like some console controller joysticks do. And while there is a warranty sticker inside the Playdate, it specifically says that you'll void the system's warranty if you break anything inside it, not that you'll void it just by taking the system apart. This strikes a good balance between "don't come in here if you don't know what you're doing" and "we trust you to make your own repairs if you need to."

The teardown also gives us a few specifics on the Playdate's intentionally low-powered hardware, which includes a 216MHz ARM Cortex M7 processor, 128 megabits (or 16MB) of RAM, and 4GB of eMMC storage. The one major complaint iFixit had is that the LCD screen appears to be glued to the front of the Playdate -- replacing the screen will probably necessitate replacing the entire rest of the casing as well. But since the front of the Playdate is simple yellow plastic rather than metal and glass, this part shouldn't cost as much as it does when your phone's screen breaks.

Tesla is working with famed video game engineer John Carmack to improve the interface performance in older vehicles. Electrek reports: Carmack is a legend in the video game world and in the broader computer science industry. He made important advancements in 3D computer graphics and was the lead programmer on game-changing video games like Doom and Quake. Later in his career, he focused his talents on virtual reality and became CTO of Oculus. More recently, he stepped down from his role at Oculus to focus on general artificial intelligence. In the 2000s, Carmack also had an interest in rocketry and started Armadillo Aerospace.

Several of these interests overlap with Elon Musk's, who has a lot of respect for Carmack and tried to hire him for a long time. While it doesn't sound like Musk has convinced him to come work with him just yet, Carmack confirmed that he is actually working on a Tesla product. Carmack drives a Tesla Model S, and he confirmed that he is working with Tesla engineers to improve interface performance: "I did kind of volunteer to help them fix what I consider very poor user interface performance on the older model S (that I drive). Their engineers have been sharing data with me." Tesla has had performance issues with its older media control unit found in older Tesla Model S vehicles. The automaker offers a media computer upgrade to improve performance, but you are stuck if you don't want to pay the $2,500 upgrade.

The US Patent and Trademark Office has granted a patent to Apple for a dual-display MacBook with a virtual keyboard replacing the traditional keyboard and with the ability to wirelessly charge an iPhone. 9to5Mac reports: As reported by Patently Apple, this patent was submitted three years ago, and only now has Apple won it. With this patent, the company could take a radical path and get rid of a physical keyboard. The interesting thing about this application is that while rumors suggest that Apple will remove the only touchable interface on the MacBook Pro, the Touch Bar, this patent imagines a MacBook with no physical keyboard at all. Patently Apple says this virtual keyboard could be rearranged, swapping the position of the virtual keyboard and trackpad. With a virtual keyboard, Apple could bring gestures from iOS and iPadOS as well, such as pinch, zoom, slide to select, and more. In the patent, Apple says this MacBook includes biometric sensors, which we could interpret as Face ID, fingerprint sensors (aka Touch ID), and a wireless charger, which would be in the left down corner of the notebook.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Los Angeles Times: A Los Angeles County man broke into thousands of Apple iCloud accounts and collected more than 620,000 private photos and videos in a plot to steal and share images of nude young women, federal authorities say. Hao Kuo Chi, 40, of La Puente, has agreed to plead guilty to four felonies, including conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to a computer, court records show. Chi, who goes by David, admitted that he impersonated Apple customer support staff in emails that tricked unsuspecting victims into providing him with their Apple IDs and passwords, according to court records. He gained unauthorized access to photos and videos of at least 306 victims across the nation, most of them young women, he acknowledged in his plea agreement with federal prosecutors in Tampa, Fla.

Chi said he hacked into the accounts of about 200 of the victims at the request of people he met online. Using the moniker "icloudripper4you," Chi marketed himself as capable of breaking into iCloud accounts to steal photos and videos, he admitted in court papers. Chi acknowledged in court papers that he and his unnamed co-conspirators used a foreign encrypted email service to communicate with each other anonymously. When they came across nude photos and videos stored in victims' iCloud accounts, they called them "wins," which they collected and shared with one another. "I don't even know who was involved," Chi said Thursday in a brief phone conversation. He expressed fear that public exposure of his crimes would "ruin my whole life."

The scam started to unravel In March 2018. A California company that specializes in removing celebrity photos from the internet notified an unnamed public figure in Tampa, Fla., that nude photos of the person had been posted on pornographic websites, according to [FBI agent Anthony Bossone]. The victim had stored the nude photos on an iPhone and backed them up to iCloud. Investigators soon discovered that a log-in to the victim's iCloud account had come from an internet address at Chi's house in La Puente, Bossone said. The FBI got a search warrant and raided the house May 19. By then, agents had already gathered a clear picture of Chi's online life from a vast trove of records that they obtained from Dropbox, Google, Apple, Facebook and Charter Communications. On Aug. 5, Chi agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy and three counts of gaining unauthorized access to a protected computer. He faces up to five years in prison for each of the four crimes.

Waymo is going to start shuttling a wider group of passengers around in its autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, California -- though they'll have to sign nondisclosure agreements, and there still will be a human safety driver behind the wheel. The Verge reports: It's the second city where the company has expanded its nascent autonomous vehicle offering, as the Google sibling has been performing fully driverless rides without a safety driver in parts of Phoenix, Arizona for more than a year now. Waymo is one of a handful of companies trying to get a commercial service off the ground built around autonomous vehicles, like Argo AI (which is backed by Ford and Volkswagen) and Cruise (which is backed by General Motors).

Waymo has been testing self-driving cars in San Francisco for a decade, dating back to when it was still just a quirky-looking project inside Google. And it has let some Waymo employees ride in the early version of the commercial AV program in San Francisco. But now people can apply through the Waymo One smartphone app to take part in what it's calling the "Trusted Tester" program, which is basically a rebranding of the "Early Rider" program it ran in Phoenix. (Waymo says the Early Rider program in Phoenix will also take on the new name.) People who are accepted into the program will be able to take rides in Waymo's autonomous Jaguar I-Pace SUVs for free but will have to offer feedback in exchange, and they won't be able to publicly share what the experience is like. There will be vehicles that are wheelchair-accessible, too. This is how the company started out the service in Phoenix, though now anyone can hop into one of its vehicles there and even film and share the experience -- warts and all. "From using the Waymo One app, to pickup and drop-offs, to the ride itself, we receive valuable feedback from our riders that allows us to refine our product offering as we advance our service" in San Francisco, the company wrote in a blog post. "We kicked off this program last week with a select few and are now expanding the program to all interested San Franciscans. We'll begin with an initial group and welcome more riders in the weeks to come."

If you plan on unlocking the bootloader to root your Galaxy Z Flip 3 or Galaxy Z Fold 3 -- Samsung's two newest foldabes announced earlier this month, you should know that the Korean OEM will disable the cameras. Technically, this has only been confirmed for the Galaxy Z Fold 3, but the Galaxy Z Flip 3 likely has similar restrictions. XDA Developers reports: According to XDA Senior Members [...], the final confirmation screen during the bootloader unlock process on the Galaxy Z Fold 3 mentions that the operation will cause the camera to be disabled. Upon booting up with an unlocked bootloader, the stock camera app indeed fails to operate, and all camera-related functions cease to function, meaning that you can't use facial recognition either. Anything that uses any of the cameras will time out after a while and give errors or just remain dark, including third-party camera apps.

It is not clear why Samsung chose the way on which Sony walked in the past, but the actual problem lies in the fact that many will probably overlook the warning and unlock the bootloader without knowing about this new restriction. Re-locking the bootloader does make the camera work again, which indicates that it's more of a software-level obstacle. With root access, it could be possible to detect and modify the responsible parameters sent by the bootloader to the OS to bypass this restriction. However, according to ianmacd, Magisk in its default state isn't enough to circumvent the barrier.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC, written by Sam Shead: German technology and engineering group Bosch, which is the world's largest car-parts supplier, believes semiconductor supply chains in the automotive industry are no longer fit for purpose as the global chip shortage rages on. Harald Kroeger, a member of the Bosch management board, told CNBC's Annette Weisbach in an exclusive interview Monday that supply chains have buckled in the last year as demand for chips in everything from cars to PlayStation 5s and electric toothbrushes has surged worldwide. Coinciding with the surge in demand, several key semiconductor manufacturing sites were forced to halt production, Kroeger said.

In February, a winter storm in Texas caused blackouts at NXP Semiconductors, which is a major provider of automotive and mobile phone chips. In March, there was a fire at a semiconductor plant in Japan operated by Renesas, one of the car industry's biggest chip suppliers. In August, factories in Malaysia have been abandoned as national lockdowns were introduced to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. Volkswagen and BMW cut their production as they struggled to get the chips they needed to build their cars. These companies and semiconductor suppliers should now be looking to figure out how the chip supply chain can be improved, Kroeger said.

"As a team, we need to sit together and ask, for the future operating system is there a better way to have longer lead times," he said. "I think what we need is more stock on some parts [of the supply chain] because some of those semiconductors need six months to be produced. You cannot run on a system [where] every two weeks you get an order. That doesn't work." Semiconductor supply chain issues have been quietly managed by the automotive in the past but now is a time for change, according to Kroeger, who believes demand is only going to increase with the rise of electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles. "Every car that gets smarter needs more semiconductors," Kroeger said. Electric cars need very powerful and efficient semiconductors in order to to get more range out of each kilowatt hour of battery, he added. Kroeger said he expects the chip shortage to extend "way into 2022" adding that he hopes demand remains stable. "We need to ramp up supplies so we can fulfill that demand," he said.

The pandemic has brought rampant growth for local food distribution platforms. From a report: For the past two decades at Crystal Organic Farm in Newborn, Georgia, a typical Saturday morning involved Nicolas Donck and, later, his partner in farming and in life, Jeni Jarrard, getting up at 4AM, loading up the truck with tables and tent and coolers and bins of eggs, peppers, okra, melons, herbs, flowers, or whatever was good that week, driving the hour to Atlanta, and spending a day in whatever weather -- including sweltering heat, pouring rain, or bitter cold -- before hauling the hour back, happy from feeding their community the food they spent all week growing, but also exhausted, and just a few hundred bucks richer for it. Then the pandemic came, and it hit farms hard. Supply chains, customer bases, and in some cases labor were upended. Small and medium-sized independent farms that relied on restaurant wholesale lost huge percentages of their business overnight. Some local CSAs folded. Some farming operations went belly up.

Others, however, found a new path online. Farmer-specific e-commerce apps and services -- among them, GrazeCart, Farmdrop, Farmigo, and GrownBy -- have cropped up in recent years, offering the direct-to-consumer sales, customizable CSAs, preorders and delivery that farmers markets haven't. When the pandemic began, this tech offered a new world of possibility. Donck and Jarrard were among the farmers who took the leap. When food distribution chains collapsed and people turned to local food, the pair made the snap decision to eliminate their old-school CSA program, lean into their relationships with two tech-based distribution platforms with which they'd already worked, and transition the rest of their business to sales and distribution platform Barn2Door. Now, late-pandemic farming looks like skipping the market, staying in bed for hours longer on Saturday, and enjoying a cup of coffee together -- all while quadrupling business by selling online. Does this ever-expanding landscape of food distribution tech make the job easy? Not in all ways, says Donck. "There's always room for improvement. For example, everybody wants cucumbers, but we don't have any right now," he says, lamenting the loss of a week's crop to a swarm of squash bugs. "[Our customers] will have to go somewhere else for those." But he and Jarrard agree, they don't intend to go back to the way things were before.

Opponents of the Belarus government said they have pulled off an audacious hack that has compromised dozens of police and interior ministry databases as part of a broad effort to overthrow President Alexander Lukashenko's regime. From a report: The Belarusian Cyber Partisans, as the hackers call themselves, have in recent weeks released portions of a huge data trove they say includes some of the country's most secret police and government databases. The information contains lists of alleged police informants, personal information about top government officials and spies, video footage gathered from police drones and detention centers and secret recordings of phone calls from a government wiretapping system, according to interviews with the hackers and documents reviewed by Bloomberg News.

Among the pilfered documents are personal details about Lukashenko's inner circle and intelligence officers. In addition, there are mortality statistics indicating that thousands more people in Belarus died from Covid-19 than the government has publicly acknowledged, the documents suggest. In an interview and on social media, the hackers said they also sabotaged more than 240 surveillance cameras in Belarus and are preparing to shut down government computers with malicious software named X-App.

After facing criticism over the app's recent move to prohibit sexually explicit content starting in October, OnlyFans CEO Tim Stokely pointed the finger at banks for the policy change. From a report: In an interview with the Financial Times published on Tuesday, Stokely singled out a handful of banks for "unfair" treatment, saying they made it "difficult to pay our creators. The change in policy, we had no choice -- the short answer is banks," Stokely told the outlet about the move to ban pornography from OnlyFans.

Clip art of a rock just sold for 400 ether, or about $1.3 million, late Monday afternoon. The transaction marks the latest sale of EtherRock, a brand of crypto collectible that's been around since 2017 -- making it one of the oldest non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the block. From a report: EtherRock is, as the name implies, a JPEG of a cartoon rock, built and sold on the ethereum blockchain. There are only 100 out there, and that scarcity is part of what's driving up its value. So, what are these rock pics good for? According to the EtherRock website, "these virtual rocks serve NO PURPOSE beyond being able to be brought and sold, and giving you a strong sense of pride in being an owner of 1 of the only 100 rocks in the game :)" Following this latest sale, the new price floor for an EtherRock NFT has been raised to $1.02 million. Two days ago, the cheapest rock went for $305,294. Two weeks ago, it was $97,716.

Nasa is delaying a spacewalk at the International Space Station because of a medical issue involving one of its astronauts. From a report: Officials announced the postponement on Monday, less than 24 hours before Mark Vande Hei was supposed to float outside. Vande Hei was dealing with "a minor medical issue," officials said. It was not an emergency, they noted, but did not provide any further details. Vande Hei, 54, a retired army colonel, has been at the space station since April and is expected to remain there until next spring for a one-year mission. This is his second station stay.

Microsoft is bringing its cloud gaming service to Xbox consoles later this year. From a report: The company announced Tuesday that Xbox Cloud Gaming, which lets players stream games rather than having to install them onto a device, would arrive on its new Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles as well as older Xbox One machines this holiday. American tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon are betting on a future of video games beyond consoles, where subscription services and software will play a much greater role. Though Microsoft is still investing heavily in Xbox hardware, it's also putting a great deal of focus into Xbox Game Pass, a subscription service that gives players access to a library of over 100 titles for about $15 a month. Cloud gaming, where games are hosted on remote servers and streamed to users over the internet, is a big part of Microsoft's strategy. The aim is to attract gamers to the Microsoft ecosystem through a range of different devices.

Samsung South Africa has announced that it has activated a TV Block Function on all Samsung TV sets stolen during the looting, violence and unrest in parts of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng during July that saw TV sets stolen from Samsung warehouses. From a report: Samsung has activated TV Block on all Samsung television sets looted from its Cato Ridge distribution centre in KwaZulu-Natal since 11 July. Samsung's television block technology is already pre-loaded on all Samsung TV products and the company says that all sets taken unlawfully and stolen from Samsung warehouses are being blocked, rendering them useless.

TV Block is a remote, security solution that detects if Samsung TV units have been unduly activated, and ensures that the television sets can only be used by the rightful owners with a valid proof of purchase. Samsung SA says that the aim of the technology is to mitigate against the creation of secondary markets linked to the sale of illegal goods, both in South Africa and beyond its borders.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigations has published its first-ever public advisory detailing the modus operandi of a "ransomware affiliate." From a report: A relatively new term, a ransomware affiliate refers to a person or group who rents access to Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) platforms, orchestrates intrusions into corporate networks, encrypt files with the "rented ransomware," and then earn a commission from successful extortions. Going by the name of OnePercent Group, the FBI said today this threat actor has been active since at least November 2020.

Samsung Group has unveiled a 240 trillion won ($205 billion) expansion that will entail hiring 40,000 people over three years, a sprawling investment blueprint intended to build the South Korean conglomerate's lead in next-generation technologies. From a report: Samsung Electronics and affiliates like Samsung Biologics aim to lead research and spending in areas from telecommunications and robotics to corporate acquisitions. The country's largest conglomerate is setting aside 180 trillion won for its home country alone and now aims to hire another 10,000 people over the period, on top of 30,000 new jobs already planned, the group said in a statement.

The envisioned spending includes expenditures outlined previously, such as Samsung Electronics' long-term goal of investing $151 billion through 2030 to delve deeper into advanced chipmaking. But the announcement comes days after Samsung scion Jay Y. Lee walked out of jail. The conglomerate's de facto leader, who was serving a sentence on graft charges, won release on parole just months ahead of South Korea's presidential election.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Tourists visiting La Gomera and El Hierro in the Canary Islands can often hear locals communicating over long distances by whistling -- not a tune, but the Spanish language. "Good whistlers can understand all the messages," says David Diaz Reyes, an independent ethnomusicologist and whistled-language researcher and teacher who lives in the islands. "We can say, 'And now I am making an interview with a Canadian guy.'" The locals are communicating in Silbo, one of the last vestiges of a much more widespread use of whistled languages. In at least 80 cultures worldwide, people have developed whistled versions of the local language when the circumstances call for it. To linguists, such adaptations are more than just a curiosity: By studying whistled languages, they hope to learn more about how our brains extract meaning from the complex sound patterns of speech. Whistling may even provide a glimpse of one of the most dramatic leaps forward in human evolution: the origin of language itself.

Whistled languages are almost always developed by traditional cultures that live in rugged, mountainous terrain or in dense forest. That's because whistled speech carries much farther than ordinary speech or shouting, says Julien Meyer, a linguist and bioacoustician at CNRS, the French national research center, who explores the topic of whistled languages in the 2021 Annual Review of Linguistics. Skilled whistlers can reach 120 decibels -- louder than a car horn -- and their whistles pack most of this power into a frequency range of 1 to 4 kHz, which is above the pitch of most ambient noise. As a result, whistled speech can be understood up to 10 times as far away as ordinary shouting can, Meyer and others have found. That lets people communicate even when they cannot easily approach close enough to shout. On La Gomera, for example, a few traditional shepherds still whistle to one another across mountain valleys that could take hours to cross.

For months, Apple and Google have been fighting a bill in the South Korean legislature that they say could imperil their lucrative app store businesses. The companies have appealed directly to South Korean lawmakers, government officials and the public to try to block the legislation, which is expected to face a crucial vote this week. From a report: The companies have also turned to an unlikely ally, one that is also trying to quash their power: the United States government. A group funded by the companies has urged trade officials in Washington to push back on the legislation, arguing that targeting American firms could violate a joint trade agreement.

The South Korean legislation would be the first law in the world to require companies that operate app stores to let users in Korea pay for in-app purchases using a variety of payment systems. It would also prohibit blocking developers from listing their products on other app stores. How the White House responds to this proposal poses an early test for the Biden administration: Will it defend tech companies facing antitrust scrutiny abroad while it applies that same scrutiny to the companies at home?

Washington has a longstanding practice of opposing foreign laws that discriminate against American firms, sometimes even when doing so conflicts with domestic policy debates. But President Biden wants a consistent approach to his concerns about the tech giants' incredible power over commerce, communications and news. In July he signed an executive order to spur competition in the industry, and his top two antitrust appointees have long been vocal critics of the companies. The approach the White House chooses may have widespread implications for the industry, and for the shape of the internet around the world.

While critics allege YouTube puts profits over public safety, product head Neal Mohan insists that the Google-owned video site is working to be a better content moderator in part because it is good for business. From a report: Users spend billions of hours watching videos on YouTube, and the site's content recommendations shape how that time is spent. Facebook and Twitter tend to get more attention on content moderation, but YouTube remains an equally important information battleground. YouTube is announcing Monday that it now has two million people in its programs that enable creators to get paid. Mohan said a huge part of his focus is trying to find ways to make sure those who play by the rules are rewarded.

"99.9% of creators are looking to do the right thing," Mohan told Axios, noting that YouTube has paid out $30 billion over the last three years. In addition to the 14-year-old program that shares ad money for popular videos, YouTube has also added ways for creators to sell merchandise or be directly compensated by users. YouTube still faces challenges in making sure it is the creators "doing the right thing" who are benefiting the most, rather than spreaders of viral misinformation. It's not just those getting paid by Google who can benefit from gaming the system. Creators with a large enough following can make money indirectly even if they've been "demonetized" -- removed from YouTube's own payment programs. In the "vast, vast majority of cases that's a good thing," Mohan said, though he acknowledges that it does create opportunities for some creators to profit from borderline content that doesn't meet YouTube's bar.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist, written by Matthew Sparkes: Ant colonies can descend several meters underground, house millions of insects and last for decades, despite being made without the benefit of machinery and reinforcing material. The secrets of these impressive architectural structures are being revealed by three-dimensional X-ray imaging and computer simulations, and could be used to develop robotic mining machines. Jose Andrade at the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues set up miniature ant colonies in a container holding 500 milliliters of soil and 15 western harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex occidentalis). The position of every ant and every grain of soil was then captured by high-resolution X-ray scans every 10 minutes for 20 hours. The X-ray results gave researchers exact details about the shape of each tunnel and which grains were being removed to create it. The team then created a computer model using those scans to understand the forces acting upon the tunnels. The size, shape and orientation of every grain was recreated in the model and the direction and size of force on each grain could be calculated, including gravity, friction and cohesion caused by humidity. The model was accurate to the 0.07 millimeter resolution of the scanner.

The results suggest that forces within the soil tend to wrap around the tunnel axis as ants excavate, forming what the team call "arches" in the soil that have a greater diameter than the tunnel itself. This reduces the load acting on the soil particles within the arches, where the ants are constructing their tunnel. As a result, the ants can easily remove these particles to extend the tunnel without causing cave-ins. The arches also make the tunnel stronger and more durable. "We had naively thought that ants perhaps were playing Jenga, that they were tapping, maybe they were wiggling grains, maybe they were even grabbing the grains of least resistance," says Andrade. He says it is now clear that the ants appear to know nothing about forces and show no signs of decision-making, but instead follow a very simple behavioral algorithm that has evolved over time.

The ants tend to dig relatively straight tunnels that descend at the angle of repose -- the slope at which a granular material naturally forms mounds -- which was around 40 degrees in this case. They also pick exactly the right grains to remove to create a protective arch above. "In a remarkable way -- in a rather, you know, serendipitous way -- they've stumbled upon a technique for digging that is in line with the laws of physics, but incredibly efficient," says Andrade. The team believes that if the behavioral algorithm can be further analyzed and ultimately replicated, then it may find application in automated mining robots, either here on Earth or on other planetary bodies where the already risky business of mining would be even more dangerous for humans. The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Netflix has announced that its long-delayed, live-action adaptation of the influential and popular classic anime series Cowboy Bebop will premiere on Friday, November 19. Ars Technica reports: The streaming service also released the first images from the show, giving fans some sense of what to expect from a live-action series based on an animated one famous for its visual flair. The images show actor John Cho (Star Trek, Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle) as the series' lead character, Spike Spiegel. The series will also star Alex Hassell (Suburbicon), Daniella Pineda (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), and Mustafa Shakir (Luke Cage), among others. Andre Nemec will be the series showrunner. He previously worked as a writer and producer on sci-fi TV series Alias and Zoo, plus the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. The director of the original anime series, Shinichiro Watanabe, is a consultant for the new show. Also returning from the anime is score composer Yoko Kanno.

Cowboy Bebop originally premiered in 1998. It is a space western about a group of bounty hunters on a spaceship called the Bebop. It drew critical acclaim and became a cult hit thanks in part to its striking visual style and its strong thematic elements.

Michelle Starr writes via ScienceAlert: Gravity is the weird, mysterious glue that binds the Universe together, but that's not the limit of its charms. We can also leverage the way it warps space-time to see distant objects that would be otherwise much more difficult to make out. This is called gravitational lensing, an effect predicted by Einstein, and it's beautifully illustrated in a new release from the Hubble Space Telescope. In the center in the image is a shiny, near-perfect ring with what appear to be four bright spots threaded along it, looping around two more points with a golden glow. This is called an Einstein ring, and those bright dots are not six galaxies, but three: the two in the middle of the ring, and one quasar behind it, its light distorted and magnified as it passes through the gravitational field of the two foreground galaxies. Because the mass of the two foreground galaxies is so high, this causes a gravitational curvature of space-time around the pair. Any light that then travels through this space-time follows this curvature and enters our telescopes smeared and distorted -- but also magnified. [...]

This, as it turns out, is a really useful tool for probing both the far and near reaches of the Universe. Anything with enough mass can act as a gravitational lens. That can mean one or two galaxies, as we see here, or even huge galaxy clusters, which produce a wonderful mess of smears of light from the many objects behind them. Astronomers peering into deep space can reconstruct these smears and replicated images to see in much finer detail the distant galaxies thus lensed. But that's not all gravitational lensing can do. The strength of a lens depends on the curvature of the gravitational field, which is directly related to the mass it's curving around. So gravitational lenses can allow us to weigh galaxies and galaxy clusters, which in turn can then help us find and map dark matter -- the mysterious, invisible source of mass that generates additional gravity that can't be explained by the stuff in the Universe we can actually detect. [...] You can download a wallpaper-sized version of the [...] image on ESA's website.