نت کرفتی

App Store Ban

The Trump Administration is officially barring Chinese-owned mobile apps WeChat and TikTok from US app stores starting Sunday, The New York Times reports.

Critics say it’ll strike a grave blow to Americans’ free speech rights and set a worrying precedent.

The move also follows a lengthy back and forth between the president and TikTok, an app owned by Chinese multinational ByteDance. The current administration sought to turn the popular video sharing app over to US ownership — but such a deal is still in the works.

National Security

The White House claims that TikTok is collecting personal information about American citizens on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party, and therefore is a threat to national security — but it has yet to show any evidence for those assertio...

Preparing for Liftoff

According to satellite imagery and ship tracking data, China is preparing to launch its Chang’e-5 sample return mission to the Moon, SpaceNews reports.

The mission will attempt to return around two kilograms of samples — the first lunar sample mission launched by any country since the early 1970s.

Components of the Long March 5 rocket launching the mission are on the way to the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center, where the launch will take place. By SpaceNews‘ estimation, the launch could take place as soon as late November.

Moon Rock Collector

China is using the same two specialized cargo ships it used to transport rocket parts used in the launch of the country’s Mars mission in July, according to SpaceNews.

Chang’e-5 will attempt to explore the area around ...

Record Breakers

About a year ago, Tesla’s Model S set the “record for fastest 4 door ever at Laguna Seca” in California, according to CEO Elon Musk. The move was likely intended to throw the gauntlet at Porsche’s feet, as the record was set mere days after the German carmaker’s announcement of the Taycan — which turned out to be a worthy competitor.

But now Player 3 has entered the game. Lucid, a startup competitor to Tesla in the electric vehicle space, just proved that its Air, an all-electric luxury sedan, can keep up just as well.

Measuring Contest

In fact, according to raw video footage uploaded to YouTube on Thursday, the company completed a lap of Laguna Seca in a blistering 1:33 using a tri-motor Air prototype, as spotted by Electrek.

That means that it shaved two se...

The Shade

A Ford executive just threw some serious shade at the automaker’s competition.

During a media briefing this Wednesday, Ford’s president of the Americas and international markets Kumar Galhotra said that Ford’s upcoming all-electric F-150 pickup truck will be a “real” work truck” — not a “lifestyle” truck like Tesla’s upcoming Cybertruck or GMC’s Hummer EV, Teslarati reports.

“While all other electric pickups are competing for lifestyle customers, the all-electric F-150 is designed and engineered for hard-working customers that need a truck to do a job,” Galhotra noted, as quoted by CNBC.

F Zero

Ford’s F-Series trucks have been the United States’ bestselling pickups for over 40 years. In 2019 alone, Ford sold almost 900,000 of them.

The F-150’s ele...

Experts say that “pandemic fatigue” is causing numbers of confirmed cases of COVID-19 to surge in parts of Europe, CNBC reports.

Numbers are rising in both France and Spain. In some instances, the number of new cases is outpacing peak numbers back in April. Both countries even surpassed the per capita-adjusted numbers in the US.

Officials suspect France’s return to tourism — particularly allowing foreign tourists to come visit — is at least partially to blame, as well as Spain’s rush to reopen its doors.

“We have a very serious situation unfolding before us,” the World Health Organization’s regional director for Europe Hans Kluge said on Thursday, the BBC reports, adding that the alarming numbers “should serve as a wake-up call for all of us.”

“There are some worry...

NASA has built a brand new system that could make landing on Moon and Mars a whole lot less risky — and it already has plans to test it out on an upcoming mission.

The agency’s Safe and Precise Landing Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) project aims to improve landing safety by combining a suite of laser sensors, a camera, a high-speed computer, and some sophisticated algorithms — all of which, it says, is capable of foregoing the need for a human pilot.

“What we’re building is a complete descent and landing system that will work for future Artemis missions to the Moon and can be adapted for Mars,” project manager Ron Sostaric said in a NASA statement. “Our job is to put the individual components together and make sure that it works as a functioning system.”

The ...

By digging through detailed infrared images of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus — courtesy of NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which met its demise back in 2017 after 13 years of Saturn exploration — NASA scientists say they’ve found “strong evidence” of fresh ice in the moon’s northern hemisphere.

The ice, thought to have originated and resurfaced from Enceladus’ interior, could be good news for the prospect of life on Enceladus, which is considered by many scientists to be one of the most promising places to look for life in the solar system.

The dataset, the most detailed global infrared views ever produced of the moon according to the agency, was created using data collected by Cassini’s Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS)...

In a new paper in the journal Science, a team of scientists has a blunt request: please stop injecting yourselves with homebrewed COVID vaccines.

Co-author Jacob Sherkow, a University of Illinois law professor, unloaded on citizen scientists experimenting with inoculating against the coronavirus in a strongly worded university press release.

“We’re all sympathetic to the notion that people want to inoculate themselves against the virus,” he said. “But people need to understand that every home remedy is not necessarily going to help, and some may very well be fatal.”

The most prominent COVID vaccine project outside the auspices of the heavily regulated pharmaceutical industry is probably in Cambridge, where a group of researchers led by famed Harvard geneticist George Church ha...