Enlarge / Mercedes-Benz is launching a network of branded EV charging sites, and some of them are coming to Buc-ee’s travel centers, so you can stock up on cake balls while you charge your EV. (credit: Mercedes-Benz/Buc-ee’s/Jonathan Gitlin)

Mercedes revealed in January it was getting into the EV infrastructure game with a plan to build out more than 400 charging hubs by 2027, under the Mercedes-Benz HPC North America banner. To do so, it partnered with ChargePoint, which provides EV charging solutions, as well as MN8 Energy, a solar and battery-storage company that will mean the Mercedes charging hubs will use entirely renewable energy to recharge their customers.

Enlarge / The Garlic Nebula in all its glory.

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.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Virgin Galactic plans “pause” in flight operations. Virgin Galactic will reduce the frequency of flights of its current suborbital vehicle and stop them entirely by mid-2024 as it concentrates resources on the next generation of vehicles, Space News reports. This was unexpected news for anyone outside of the company. As Ars has previously reported, Virgin Galactic has ramped up the flight rate for its VSS Unity suborbital spaceplane to about one mission per month, a rather impressive cadence, especially when Blue Origin, the other player in the suborbital human spaceflight market, has not flown any people to space in more than a year.

Enlarge / Hulu content may do a not-so-secret-invasion of Disney+. (credit: Marvel)

Iger told investors that the beta will be available to US subscribers bundling their Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions and will give “parents time to set up profiles and parental controls that work best for their families ahead of the official launch,” as per a transcription from The Motley Fool.

We first learned that Disney was planning a combined Disney+ and Hulu app in May when Disney owned two-thirds of Hulu. At the time, Iger called the unified app a “local progression” of Disney’s consumer portfolio that would streamline content, boost audience engagement, and impress advertisers. Disney also pointed to potential cheaper customer acquisition costs. Wednesday’s update follows Disney’s announcement last week that it’s buying the last third of Hulu, giving Disney total ownership.

Enlarge / Mood lighting orb not included. (credit: Valve)

Given the 2021 launch of Nintendo’s Switch OLED, it might seem a little weird that we’ve had to wait nearly two years after the original Steam Deck launch for today’s announcement of an OLED-equipped version. In interviews surrounding that announcement, though, Valve says an OLED screen was never in the cards for the original Steam Deck, given the timeline involved.

Valve designer Jeremy Selan tells IGN that “the display technology for the HDR display, we kicked that off prior to even having shipped the first [Steam Deck].” Selan added to Rock Paper Shotgun that work on this OLED update started “basically immediately” after the original unit was released.

“We knew we needed a better display, even from day one,” Selan told RPS. “It just takes multiple years, it takes a lot of money.”

Enlarge / People walk by a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT billboard in Times Square on June 23, 2022 in New York City. Sunglasses would have been a good idea for this year’s ApeFest. (credit: Getty | Noam Galai)

The injuries reportedly occurred during “ApeFest,” a three-day annual meet-up of people who own Bored Ape NFTs—which sell for tens of thousands of dollars and, amid the 2021 NFT craze, saw highly inflated prices of hundreds of thousands of dollars. However regretful, owners of the cryptocurrency-backed, digital images of nonchalant cartoon primates are automatic members of the BAYC. This year, their annual club event ran from November 3–5 and promised “mayhem” and “One big night full of surprises.”

Soon after an ApeFest party Saturday night, some attendees reported severe pain and burning sensations in their eyes, as well as vision problems and skin irritation, according to Yuga Labs. Doctors and others on the Internet quickly speculated that the cause was UV exposure and photokeratitis (aka snow blindness, arc eye, or welder’s flash), which is akin to a sunburn on the cornea (the clear tissue covering the front of your eye) due to exposure to UV light. The New York Times reported as of Tuesday that the number of attendees injured was over 20.

Enlarge / Infotainment system in a 2016 Ford Escape. (credit: Getty Images | Todd Korol )

We’ll cover the Ford ruling here since the other decisions don’t go into the same level of detail, and the arguments were similar in all five cases. The simple version is that the cases failed because the plaintiffs’ data stayed in the car systems and apparently was never transmitted to law enforcement, Ford, or anyone else.

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  Gmail’s reply bar. A very strange interface for email. [credit:
  Android Police
  ]

Does Gmail want to be an instant messaging client? Last month the popular webmail app shipped an emoji reactions bar in the mobile app, where a single tap would send a new email with your emoji response. Now, a wild new UI experiment spotted by Android Police goes another step further: a quick reply bar that looks just like instant messaging input.

Rather than the usual input block you get for writing paragraphs of overly formal text, this new Gmail experiment has a one-line input bar at the bottom for replies. A drop down just above it lets you pick from the usual “reply,” “reply all,” or “Forward” options. Besides that you get an attachment and send button. An “expand” button will presumably launch the usual compose interface.

So far this seems to be an extremely rare test that only one person has gotten, so it’s not necessarily going to roll out to everyone. Given the recent emoji launch, though, Gmail certainly seems jealous of its instant-messaging cousins.

Enlarge / Lumafield’s blog shared this image showing CT scans of three earbuds. The left is a real AirPods Pro (2nd Gen). The wire-riddled two on the right are fakes. (credit: Lumafield)

Whether they’re products pretending to be made by a brand or devices claiming to be something they’re not, (like a microSD card posing as an SSD), fraudulent electronics pose a threat to unsuspecting shoppers’ wallets and, at times, their safety. With their popularity and high prices, scammers often target Apple products. But what’s actually inside those faux Apple devices?

To find out, Lumafield busted out its $75,000 CT scanner to illustrate what people get when they end up with counterfeit MacBook chargers or knockoff AirPods Pro.

Lumafield makes industrial CT scanners and software. Lately, it has been using its Neptune scanner to examine electronics, like Apple’s $130 Thunderbolt 4 cable. This week, Lumafield provided CT scans (which you can play with via Lumafield’s online Voyager software) of the AirPods Pro 2nd Generation (here), two counterfeits (here and here), as well as a look at Apple’s 85 W MagSafe 2 Power Adapter (here) and a fake (here).

Enlarge (credit: Matt Cardy / Contributor | Getty Images Europe)

On Thursday, a top European court ruled that Austria cannot force Google, Meta, and TikTok to pay millions in fines if they fail to delete hate speech from their popular social media platforms.

Austria had attempted to hold platforms accountable for hate speech and other illegal content after passing a law in 2021 requiring tech giants to publish reports as often as every six months detailing content takedowns. Like the European Union’s recently adopted Digital Services Act, the Austrian law sought to impose fines—up to $10.69 million, Reuters reported—for failing to tackle illegal or harmful content.

However, soon after Austria tried to enforce the law, Google, Meta, and TikTok—each with EU operations based in Ireland—challenged it in an Austrian court. The tech companies insisted that Austria’s law conflicted with an EU law that says that platforms are only subject to laws in EU member states where they’re established.

Enlarge (credit: StoreDot)

More than a century has conditioned us to think that refueling a car should take just a few minutes, so the 30–60 minutes that most EVs require to fast-charge seems offensive to many motorists. And that’s assuming the chargers work flawlessly—far from a safe assumption in 21st century America, unfortunately.

Right now, most automakers’ solution to this problem is to throw lithium-ion at it, building EVs with such big battery storage capacities that an unaerodynamic pickup truck could go more than 400 miles between plug-ins. There are, of course, problems with this approach.

Enlarge (credit: Valve)

An update to Valve’s handheld PC gaming system, a “Limited Edition” Steam Deck OLED, will be available next week. The new version improves the screen quality, the amount of battery, and the Wi-Fi capacity, plus a “6nm APU.” Starting at $549 for the 512GB storage version, the OLED Decks are available beginning November 16, with “highly limited” quantities.

LCD models of the Steam Deck are also being phased out, with discounts on the 64GB and 512 GB versions while supplies last.

Valve claims the Steam Deck OLED will offer “brighter colors, blacker blacks,” with “amazing motion rendition,” shoring up one of the major nitpicks about the Deck’s launch version. The OLED model also touts 30–50 percent more battery life, weighs 30 g less than the original, and can download up to three times faster.

Enlarge / “You’ll never be bored again” is one of the more fitting slogans attached to Tumblr. (credit: Getty Images)

Internet statesman and Waxy.org proprietor Andy Baio posted what is “apparently an internal Automattic memo making the rounds on Tumblr” to Threads. The memo, written to employees at WordPress.com parent company Automattic, which bought Tumblr from Verizon’s media arm in 2019, is titled or subtitled “You win or you learn.” The posted memo states that a majority of the 139 employees working on product and marketing at Tumblr (in a team apparently named “Bumblr”) will “switch to other divisions.” Those working in “Happiness” (Automattic’s customer support and service division) and “T&S” (trust and safety) would remain.

“We are at the point where after 600+ person-years of effort put into Tumblr since the acquisition in 2019, we have not gotten the expected results from our effort, which was to have revenue and usage above its previous peaks,” the posted memo reads. After quotes and anecdotes about love, loss, mountain climbing, and learning on the journey, the memo notes that nobody will be let go and that team members can make a ranked list of their top three preferred assignments elsewhere inside Automattic.

Enlarge / Host James Burke returns for a reboot of his classic science series Connections on Curiosity Stream. (credit: Curiosity Stream)

Some 15 years ago, a friend recommended I check out a vintage BBC science documentary series called Connections: “I just think it will resonate with how your mind works.” He was right. I was immediately hooked and devoured every available episode, following host James Burke down countless fascinating historical rabbit holes before arriving at an unexpected final destination—although in retrospect, the haphazard journey somehow made perfect sense. Connections was the science documentary series for compulsively curious people who weren’t necessarily drawn to more traditional science and nature documentaries. And now Burke is back and better than ever with six new episodes of a rebooted Connections, thanks to the folks at Curiosity Stream.

The series had been around for decades before I made my belated discovery. The BBC first aired Connections to the UK back in 1978, expanding to the US the following year. Produced and directed by Mick Jackson, each episode would start with some past innovation or event—the invention of the cannon and subsequent changes to castle fortifications to eliminate blind spots, for example. Then Burke would spend the remainder of the episode tracking a path through a series of seemingly unrelated events—maps, limelight, incandescent bulbs, substituting guncotton for ivory in billiard balls, the zoopraxiscope, the telegraph—to demonstrate how they all connected to produce a modern-day breakthrough: the movie projector.

Much of the delight came from all those surprising and unexpected connections. But Burke also had an overarching philosophy about the nature of change and innovation, arguing that rather than progress occurring in a conventional linear fashion, it occurred nonlinearly via an intricate web of interconnected events. In short, one simply could not understand a new modern scientific breakthrough or technology in isolation. That’s why the series was subtitled “An Alternative View of Change.”

Enlarge / AMD’s RX 480, which got good reviews back in 2016 for its performance and budget-friendly $200 starting price. (credit: Mark Walton)

If you’ve been hanging on to an old AMD Radeon GPU, though, there’s some bad news: According to AnandTech, AMD is beginning to pull back on driver support for some of its late-2010s-era GPUs, most notably its Polaris and Vega GPU architectures. Support for these GPUs has already been removed from the company’s Linux drivers, and Windows drivers for the GPUs will be limited mostly to “critical updates.”

“The AMD Polaris and Vega graphics architectures are mature, stable and performant and don’t benefit as much from regular software tuning,” reads AMD’s official statement. “Going forward, AMD is providing critical updates for Polaris- and Vega-based products via a separate driver package, including important security and functionality updates as available. The committed support is greater than for products AMD categorizes as legacy, and gamers can still enjoy their favorite games on Polaris and Vega-based products.”

Baby Luigi represents the reaction of sandbagging racers in this artistic rendering. (credit: Nintendo)

Since Mario Kart 8‘s launch on the Wii U, one of the game’s most successful and controversial strategies has involved intentionally hanging out at the back of the pack to amass and abuse the game’s best items. Now, over nine years since the game’s initial release, Nintendo has taken steps to eliminate the controversial “bagging” strategy in the latest update to the Switch’s Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

Mario Kart 8 players who made use of “bagging” (short for “sandbagging” and sometimes also called “item smuggling”) in online races would briefly retreat to last place to sit on a regenerating item box, waiting to acquire some of the game’s most powerful items (which are much more likely to appear when you are far away from first place). The bagging player could then use one of those items (say, a Golden Mushroom and/or Starman) to quickly catch up with the pack before using the other amassed item (say, a Bullet Bill) to build up a dominant lead. The strategy can be especially effective on tracks like “Cheese Land,” where using a Bullet Bill in very specific locations can extend how long the powerful item lasts.

Not “cheating,” but not exactly “racing”?

Despite bagging’s controversial reputation among many players, the strategy isn’t really comparable to outright cheating—baggers play an unmodified version of the game as it was designed, after all. And for years, many Mario Kart 8 players have argued that it’s a perfectly fair strategy that requires actual skill to use effectively. “Sandbagging is a risk vs reward kind of thing,” GameFAQs user RydeonHD wrote in 2016. “There have been many times where it can just plain out backfire (in those cases, it would’ve just been better to strive for first).”

Enlarge / The Nismo version of the Nissan Z has a raft of mechanical changes, but the first thing you notice is a less-objectionable front fascia. (credit: Bradley Iger)

In the world of high-performance Nissan cars, the Nismo badge carries weight. Like BMW M and Toyota’s Gazoo Racing arm, it oversees Nissan’s motorsports efforts and serves as its in-house tuning department for the automaker’s most performance-focused road car offerings. Founded in 1984, the skunkworks division has a reputation for building formidable track weapons like the GT-R Nismo, which set a lap record for volume production road cars at the famed Nürburgring back in 2013.

While the department has been relatively quiet lately (likely due to the limited number of enthusiast models that have graced Nissan’s line-up in recent years), we knew it was only a matter of time before we’d see its handiwork applied to the new Z.

As we noted in our first drive of the standard Z last year, the seventh-generation machine ushered in a much-needed overhaul of Nissan’s rear-drive sports car that addressed many of its predecessor’s shortcomings, but a few laps of Las Vegas Motor Speedway’s road course revealed that there was still room for improvement in terms of outright performance prowess.