Enlarge / Infowars-founder Alex Jones speaks to the media outside Waterbury Superior Court on September 21, 2022 during one of his Sandy Hook defamation trials. (credit: Getty Images | Joe Buglewicz)

Musk restored the @RealAlexJones account after polling X users. With almost 2 million votes, about 70 percent of users supported reinstating Jones, who was banned by Twitter in 2018.

“I vehemently disagree with what he said about Sandy Hook, but are we a platform that believes in freedom of speech or are we not? That is what it comes down to in the end. If the people vote him back on, this will be bad for X financially, but principles matter more than money,” Musk wrote on Saturday. Musk also spoke with Jones about his Sandy Hook comments in a live interview on X.

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Electrification is a big challenge if you’re a small automaker. And Mazda is a small automaker, one that’s in danger of being caught out by a range of inefficient gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles. But the Japanese company hasn’t given up on electric vehicles, it says. In an interview with Auto News, Mazda CEO Masahiro Moro says the company will be an “intentional follower” in this space and that questionable demand for EVs justifies this strategy.

“One of the big issues for us is demand is uncertain,” Moro said. “In the current market, the reality for electrification, in particular for battery EVs, is the pace is not that high. So we may start a little slower in terms of the ramp-up. Not necessarily in terms of timing, but the ramp-up.”

In time, we should see a family of new Mazda-designed EVs built on a new platform. But the division that has to design them, called e-Mazda, was only created in November. Moro told Auto News that the division will focus on making EVs lighter and more affordable but won’t develop compact or smaller EVs as the cost of batteries makes them unprofitable.

Enlarge / In the past you needed to be brave to own an Italian motorcycle. Now you just need to be brave to ride one. (credit: Ducati)

BOLOGNA, ITALY—For decades, owning an Italian motorcycle required a tradeoff. On one hand, Italian bikemakers led the pack with gorgeous designs and the most exotic, highest-performing engines in the world. No other country could come close to matching the sounds and smells of a Ducati, Moto Guzzi, or Aprilia revving by. But build quality and reliability always presented a challenge for owners, not to mention parts availability and exorbitant maintenance costs.

Ducati arguably led the charge in every regard, setting a standard as the Ferrari of the motorcycle world with eye-catching Rosso Corsa red paint jobs to go along with real racing success in MotoGP and World Superbike thanks to famous—some might say infamous—desmodromic engines. However, In recent years under Volkswagen Group’s ownership, Ducati has made great strides in reliability and build quality, which explains to a large extent why 2022 was the firm’s most profitable year ever, with 62,000 bikes sold worldwide.

During a recent trip to Italy, I visited the Ducati factory in Bologna to learn how modernizing the production facility at Borgo Panigale helped improve the bikes built there over the decade since joining the Volkswagen group.

Enlarge / This striking image shows the densely packed globular cluster known as NGC 2210, which is situated in the Large Magellanic Cloud. (credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Sarajedini, F. Niederhofer)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Enlarge / The Homey Pro, settling in for some quiet network check-ins at dusk. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

I know there are people who will want to buy the Homey Pro. I’ve seen them on social media and in various home automation forums, and I’ve even noticed them in the comments on this website. For this type of person, the Homey Pro might serve as a specialized, locally focused smart home hub, one that’s well worth the cost. But you should be really, truly certain that you’re that person before you take a $400 leap with it.

Homey Pro is a smart home hub pitched primarily at someone who wants to keep things local as much as possible, forgoing phone apps, speakers, and cloud connections. That means using the Homey Pro to boost a primarily Zigbee or Z-Wave network, while also looping in local Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and even infrared remotes. It’s for someone willing to pay $400 for a device that offers robust local or cloud backups, professional design, advanced automation, and even a custom scripting language, along with access to some “experiments” and still-in-progress tech like Matter and Thread. It’s for someone who might want to add a select cloud service or two to their home, but not because they have no other option.

But this somebody has also, somehow, not already invested in Home Assistant, Hubitat, or HomeBridge, which are more open to both add-on hardware (like new capabilities added on by USB stick or GPIO pins) and deep tinkering. It’s someone who is willing to check that every device they want to control will work with Homey. While the device offers a pretty sizable range of apps and integrations, it’s far from the near-universal nature of major open-source projects or even the big smart home platforms. And you have to do a little checking further, still, to ensure that individual products are supported, not just the brand.

Enlarge / ULA’s Vulcan rocket rolls to the launch pad for testing. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

The launch company’s chief executive, Tory Bruno, announced the delay on the social media site X on Sunday. United Launch Alliance had been working toward a debut flight of the lift booster on Christmas Eve, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Bruno made the announcement after the company attempted to complete a fueling test of the entire rocket, known as a wet dress rehearsal.

Enlarge / Sisal is an invasive species that is also grown agriculturally. (credit: Chris Hellier)

Women and girls across much of the developing world lack access to menstrual products. This means that for at least a week or so every month, many girls don’t go to school, so they fall behind educationally and often never catch up economically. 

Many conventional menstrual products have traditionally been made of hydrogels made from toxic petrochemicals, so there has been a push to make them out of biomaterials. But this usually means cellulose from wood, which is in high demand for other purposes and isn’t readily available in many parts of the globe. So Alex Odundo found a way to solve both of these problems: making maxi pads out of sisal, a drought-tolerant agave plant that grows readily in semi-arid climates like his native Kenya.

Putting an invasive species to work

Sisal is an invasive plant in rural Kenya, where it is often planted as livestock fencing and feedstock. It doesn’t require fertilizer, and its leaves can be harvested all year long over a five- to seven-year span. Odundo and his partners in Manu Prakash’s lab at Stanford University developed a process to generate soft, absorbent material from the sisal leaves. It relies on treatment with dilute peroxyformic acid (1 percent) to increase its porosity, followed by washing in sodium hydroxide (4 percent) and then spinning in a tabletop blender to enhance porosity and make it softer. 

Enlarge / The Ford Mustang Mach-E is now in its third year of production, so it felt like a good idea to see how it’s maturing. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

When Ars first drove the then-new Ford Mustang Mach-E back in early 2021, the car was an attention magnet. Now, almost three years later, the Mustang Mach-E is a much more common sight on our roads, but so are other electric crossovers from most of Ford’s usual rivals, including the sales juggernaut that is the Tesla Model Y. We decided to book a few days with a Mustang Mach-E to see how (or if) this equine EV has matured since launch.

Originally, Ford had been working on a much more boring battery electric car until Tesla started delivering its Model 3s, at which point a hastily convened “Team Edison” set to work adding some much-needed brio to the design, rethinking Ford’s EV strategy in the process.

Giving this midsize crossover EV a Mustang name tag remains divisive—I expect a reasonable percentage of comments to this story will be people showing up to complain, “It ain’t no real Mustang.” The crossover’s name is what it is, and there are plenty of Mustang styling cues, but even with the designers’ trick of using black trim to make you ignore the bits they don’t want you to see, there’s no denying the proportions are pretty far from coupe-like.

Enlarge / This digitally colorized scanning electron micrograph (SEM) revealed some of the comparative ultrastructural morphology between normal red blood cells (RBCs), and a sickle cell RBC (left) found in a blood specimen of an 18-year-old female patient with sickle cell anemia. (credit: CDC)

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved two gene therapies to treat sickle cell disease, one of the which is the first CRISPR/Cas9-based treatment to win regulatory approval in the US.

The announcement is a landmark in the treatment of sickle cell disease, a devastating condition in which red blood cells deform into a sickle shape and clog up blood vessels. Sickle cell disease affects around 100,000 people in the US, most commonly African Americans. It leads to anemia, vaso-occlusive events and crises (painful episodes in which small blockages starve tissue of oxygen), strokes, progressive and irreversible organ damage, decreased quality of life, and early death.

Until today, treatments have been limited. A bone marrow transplant from a genetically matched sibling can cure the condition more than 90 percent of the time, but only around 20 percent of people with the disease have such a genetically matched sibling donor. There are also multiple drugs available and supportive care, but these mainly reduce the severity of the disease. The new gene therapy treatments, on the other hand, have shown to be highly effective at preventing vaso-occlusive events and crises.

Enlarge / Beeper Mini’s promises of “Blue bubbles” on Android seemed to have been nixed by a certain Cupertino-based firm on Friday. (credit: Beeper)

Beeper Mini, the Android app born from a reverse-engineering of Apple’s iMessage service, is currently broken, and it is unknown whether it will resume functioning.

Beeper desktop users received a message from co-founder Eric Migicovsky late on Friday afternoon, noting an “iMessage outage” and that “messages are failing to send and receive.” Reports had started piling up on Reddit around 2:30 pm Eastern. As of 5:30 pm, the app was still reporting errors in sending and receiving messages, with “Failed to lookup on sever: lookup request timed out.” Comments on Beeper’s status post on X (formerly Twitter) suggested mixed results, at best, among users.

The Verge, messaging with Migicovsky, reported that he “did not deny that Apple has successfully blocked Beeper Mini”; to TechCrunch, Migicovsky more clearly stated about an Apple cut-off: “Yes, all data indicates that.” To both outlets, Migicovsky offered the same comment, re-iterating his belief that it was in the best interests of Apple to let iPhone owners and Android users send encrypted messages to one another. (Ars reached out to Migicovsky for comment and will update this post with new information).

Enlarge / The HP LaserJet M106w is one of the printer models that is mysteriously appearing for some users in Windows 10 and 11. (credit: HP)

Earlier this month, Microsoft posted a new entry in its list of known issues with fully up-to-date Windows 11 PCs: The HP Smart printer app was installing automatically on Windows 10 and Windows 11 PCs whether they had an HP printer installed or not, changing the names and icons of their connected printers and causing error messages.

Affected PCs will usually appear to have an HP LaserJet M101-M106 connected, so look for that model number in your list of printers (people who actually own one of those HP LaserJets presumably won’t have problems). All versions of Windows 11 are affected, plus all currently supported versions of Windows 10; Windows Server versions going back to 2012 can also be affected.

Microsoft continues to look into the issue, but in an update posted yesterday, the company stated unambiguously that HP was not to blame. The company also says that most printers should continue to work fine, and that they “will continue to use the expected drivers for printer operations.” But if your printer relies on a third-party app for additional functionality, that may be broken.

Enlarge / The iPhone 15 Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

According to a report in Bloomberg, Tang Tan, vice president of Product Design, is leaving Apple, and his departure heralds a shuffle of executives heading up some of the company’s most important products.

Sometimes, you might wonder just how much a specific executive influences the grand scheme of things, but the report claims that people within Apple see Tan’s departure as “a blow,” clarifying that he “made critical decisions about Apple’s most important products.” His team reportedly had “tight control” over the look and functionality of those products.

Tan oversaw major aspects of iPhone and Apple Watch design, and he was the executive overseeing accessories and AirPods, as well. He reported to John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, who is likely a more widely known name.

Enlarge / A Verizon logo at GSMA Mobile World Congress 2019 on February 26, 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. (credit: Getty Images | David Ramos)

Glauner was charged yesterday with stalking and fraud “in connection with obtaining confidential phone records” in US District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. We aren’t posting or linking directly to the court record because it seems to contain the victim’s home address. The incident was previously reported by 404 Media.

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Researchers from security firm Group-IB have named the remote access trojan “Krasue,” after a nocturnal spirit depicted in Southeast Asian folklore “floating in mid-air, with no torso, just her intestines hanging from below her chin.” The researchers chose the name because evidence to date shows it almost exclusively targets victims in Thailand and “poses a severe risk to critical systems and sensitive data given that it is able to grant attackers remote access to the targeted network.

According to the researchers:

Enlarge / From left to right, the head of an actual worm, and the stolon of a male and female. (credit: Nakamura et. al.)

Megasyllis nipponica really exists on Earth. Otherwise known as the Japanese green syllid worm, it reproduces by a process known as stolonization, which sounds like the brainchild of a sci-fi horror genius but evolved in some annelid (segmented) worms to give future generations the best chance at survival. What was still a mystery (until now) was exactly how that bizarre appendage, or stolon, could form its own head in the middle of the worm’s body. Turns out this is a wonder of gene regulation.