Serena Williams is Architectural Digest’s new cover star. In the feature, written by former Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Elaine Welteroth, Williams walks AD through her Miami enclave, designed by sister Venus’s design firm V Starr. It’s a lot.
There’s a karaoke room, and textured rock walls, and a dining room covered in over a dozen brass pendant lamps of all shapes and sizes. The house is overflowing with color and art and trophies, but the room which most caught my eye was her office. In it are two chairs, both pink. One is a modest office-model chair. The other is, quite surprisingly, a gamer chair. First made famous amongst PC gamers for their racecar-like design—legend has it the early models were made by a racing car company—these days, they are most popularly seen occupied by famous Twitch streamers, with the cash to dish out for them. It would appear that Serena’s model is only $200, for any interested.
Does Serena Williams game?
Yes, actually. She recently starred in a Nintendo Switch advertisement over the holidays, and also released a convoluted Snapchat game with Gatorade back in 2016. But in that office in particular, when she has a whole suite of comfy, cozy rooms to kick back in with Super Mario Bros.? Probably not.
The chair is just comfortable!
But I am also one of a very few people that might actually feel some sort of emotion about Serena Williams’ gamer chair, so here are the other highlights from the house tour.
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This is her karaoke room, complete with instruments and a bar.
Screenshot: Youtube
My personal favorite room is the living room, which she calls the gallery, where all the art is. There’s a dead Elmo armchair from KAWS, and a Radcliffe Bailey wall mural that features actual moon rocks. All things most people decorate a living room with.
Screenshot: Youtube
Another stand-out piece in her gallery is a clear Wurlitzer piano, which she bought because she wanted a piano for her daughter to play, “but didn’t want it to be so heavy.” It’s so expensive that I couldn’t even find a price for it online.
Screenshot: Youtube
She also has a trophy room, because of course.
Screenshot: Youtube
The rest of her house is hidden behind the magazine’s paywall, but she is gracious enough to leave those of us without Architectural Digest subscriptions with a closing shot of her concealed bookcase door.
Photo: Presley Ann/Getty Images for the Los Angeles LGBT Center (Getty Images)
After months of defending her choice of casting the neurotypical actor Maddie Ziegler as an autistic character in the upcoming movie Music and beefing with critics online (including the very people her film is attempting to represent), Sia, it seems, has had a change of heart. Or, now that she’s nominated for an award, she’s in damage-control overdrive. You decide!
Per Variety, the singer/songwriter/first-time director announced that she has “been listening” and will include a warning at the start of the Golden-Globe nominated film that reads: “Music in no way condones or recommends the use of restraint on autistic people. There are autistic occupational therapists that specialize in sensory processing who can be consulted to explain safe ways to provide proprioceptive, deep-pressure feedback to help w meltdown safety.” Restraint and seclusion interventions are widely acknowledged as dangerous and abusive (in 2018, a 13-year-old autistic boy died after being restrained by a staff member in his high school).
“I plan to remove the restraint scenes from all future printings. I listened to the wrong people and that is my responsibility, my research was clearly not thorough enough, not wide enough,” tweeted Sia.
She also tweeted, “I’m sorry.” About an hour after this series of tweets, she deleted her Twitter. If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? If you tweet an apology and then delete your Twitter, is it an actual apology? Maybe not, but at least we have blogs to catalog receipts.
A ceramic Granitec pan, showing a dry spot at center—the result of thermocapillary convection.Image: Alex Fedorchenko
An investigation into the way oils behave on hot, flat surfaces has uncovered the process responsible for foods sticking to non-stick frying pans.
I love the opening line to this new paper, published today in Physics of Fluids: “Here, the phenomenon of food sticking when frying in a frying pan is experimentally explained.”
Concise and straight to the point, as is the explanation: “thermocapillary convection,” according to the authors, Alexander Fedorchenko and Jan Hruby, both from the Czech Academy of Sciences.
This is very powerful knowledge. The next time this happens while cooking, you can shake your angry fist at the stovetop and say, “curse you, thermocapillary convection!” It’ll be a very satisfying moment, not just because you have a fancy new term at your disposal, but also because you’ll have full awareness of what it actually means.
For their experiment, Fedorchenko and Hruby, specialists in fluid dynamics and thermophysics, tested two non-stick frying pans—one coated in ceramic particles and one covered with Teflon. The surfaces of the pans were covered with a thin layer of sunflower oil, and then, using an overhead camera, the scientists measured the speed at which it took dry spots to form and grow as the pans were heated.
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The scientists noticed that, as the pans were being warmed from below, a temperature gradient appeared across the oily film. This in turn created a surface tension gradient, which directed the oils away from the center of the pan and towards the periphery; liquids with high surface tension pull more forcefully on surrounding liquids compared to liquids with low surface tension.
A Teflon pan showing the effect in action. Image: Alex Fedorchenko
This is an excellent example of thermocapillary convection at work—a phenomenon in which a surface tension gradient forces a liquid (in this case, oil) to migrate outwards. Once this happens, food is more apt to stick to the center of the pan, the result of the “formation of a dry spot in the thin sunflower oil film,” according to the study.
Fedorchenko and Hruby actually created a formula to calculate the “dewetting rate,” which measures the speed of receding oil droplets. Very cool, but the word “dewetting” is something we don’t need in our lives right now. The scientists also identified the conditions that lead to dry spots, resulting in the following advice:
“To avoid unwanted dry spot formation, the following set of measures (and/or) should be applied: increasing the oil film thickness, moderate heating, completely wetting the surface of the pan with oil, using a pan with a thick bottom, stirring food regularly during cooking,” the authors write.
Wow. Don’t know about you, but for me that’s all blazingly obvious advice (not to mention how the first and third items on that list are basically the same thing). Except for using pans with a thick bottom—I didn’t know that. But to be fair, I often used a cast iron pan when frying foods, so I must’ve subconsciously felt this to be true.
Anyhoo, this is all making me very hungry, so I’m going to end it right here, head to the kitchen, and do my best to master the idiosyncrasies thermocapillary convection.
A view of downtown Seattle.Photo: John Moore (Getty Images)
The Washington state government has suffered a large data breach involving unemployment claims, potentially exposing data on more than 1.6 million people, officials admitted Monday.
The data appears to have been compromised through Accellion, a third-party vendor that was contracting with the state auditor’s office. In mid-December, the company suffered a cyberattack via a zero-day vulnerability in its legacy file transfer application.
The data exposed is quite sensitive, and includes names, bank account and routing information, social security numbers, place of employment, and driver’s license numbers.
This all happened, ironically, while the auditor’s office was looking to do a thorough investigation of the state’s ongoing problems with unemployment fraud—some of which has been linked to notorious cyber actors, like the Nigerian threat group Scattered Canary. SAO was using Accellion’s file transfer software as it sifted through unemployment claims filed in Washington over the past year, the auditor’s office said Monday:
SAO was reviewing all claims data as part of an audit of that fraud incident. The data involves about 1.6 million claims and included the person’s name, social security number and/or driver’s license or state identification number, bank information, and place of employment.
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The SAO’s office said they were only recently notified of the full extent of the breach, as the attack appears to have occurred on Dec. 25 and their office wasn’t notified about it until Jan. 12, after Accellion announced it had been hacked. The office further commented that they were “seeking a full understanding of the timeline of the incident and the status of Accellion’s investigation and the investigation by law enforcement” and that they didn’t currently “have enough information to draw conclusions about the timing or full scope of what took place.”
Accellion claims that it fixed the flaw within 72 hours of being made aware of it, but that the initial security incident was just the “beginning of a concerted cyberattack” on its FTA product that continued “into January.” The company subsequently “identified additional exploits in the ensuing weeks and rapidly developed and released patches to close each vulnerability,” it said.
Other prominent institutions have also been affected by this attack, including the large Australian law firm Allens and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
Accellion has announced it is contracting with a “industry-leading cybersecurity forensics firm” to produce an assessment of how the attack occurred. It has promised to share the findings of the report when it becomes available.
Updated, 02/01/2021 at 6:27pm: The original story misstated the number of people who were potentially affected and has since been corrected.
Apple may have struggled to get its AirPower multi-device charging pad to work, but just over the horizon is a new technology that promises to make wireless charging truly wireless, and Xiaomi is the latest company to promise a world without charging cables—we just don’t know when it will actually arrive.
Wireless charging in its current form is definitely convenient since it allows you to just plop a device like a smartphone or headphones down on a pad to top off its battery without having to reach for a cable. But at the same time, it’s also restrictive, requiring you to all but abandon a device on a desk or side table until it’s charged. Truly wireless charging is the ideal solution because as long as you’re in the same room as a wireless power transmitter your phone will charge no matter where it is, even if you’re still using it in hand.
It sounds like total science fiction, but the technology exists, and back in 2016 a company called Ossia demonstrated working prototypes of its Cota wireless charging system at CES. A smartphone (upgraded with a special case) could be carried anywhere around the company’s booth and it would continue to charge indefinitely. Today, Xiaomi announced its own wireless charging eco-system called “Mi Air Charge Technology” that appears to offer similar functionality (and limitations) as Ossia’s Cota tech.
In lieu of wires or a pair of aligned magnetic coils, Mi Air Charge uses a transmitter (that’s about the size of a portable air conditioner) packed with antennas that both accurately determine the location of a device and then use beamforming to broadcast “millimeter-wide waves” towards it. A separate smaller collection of antennas function as a receiver inside another device, converting the wireless signals into about 5-watts of power, which is what the iPhone’s tiny cube charger delivered when plugged into a power outlet.
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Xiaomi promises the system can provide power to multiple devices all at the same time, be it a smartphone, a tablet, headphones, or even a pair of wirelessly powered batteries like Ossia also demonstrated a few years ago that ensures legacy devices never need a fresh pair. Distances are still limited to several meters, or roughly the size of an average room, but the technology isn’t hindered by physical obstacles, so the beefy power transmitter can potentially be hidden away out of sight.
It’s exciting to see more companies announce wireless charging solutions like this because it helps legitimize the technology, but unfortunately, to date all we really have are announcements. Since its debut at CES 2016 Ossia still hasn’t launched a wireless charging product available to consumers. And Xiaomi’s announcement today doesn’t even include vague promises about how long it will take the company to make its Mi Air Charge Technology available outside its own R&D labs.
There are considerable challenges to making this technology both safe and reliable, and it’s unfortunately not backward-compatible. Moving forward Xiaomi could include the compact antenna receiver array in its future smartphones, but your iPhone won’t work with the system without a special charging case, or Apple agreeing to play nice with Xiaomi. There’s little doubt truly wireless charging will one day be commonplace—we might even be able to blanket entire cities in wireless power instead of requiring a transmitter in every room of a house—but for now, it still remains nothing more than a tantalizing tech demo.
The night side of Venus as seen in thermal infrared. Image: JAXA/ISAS/DARTS/Damia Bouic
Scientists stunned the world last year by claiming to have discovered traces of phosphine in the Venusian clouds. New research suggests this gas—which, excitingly, is produced by microbes—was not actually responsible for the signal they detected. Instead, it was likely sulfur dioxide, a not-so-thrilling chemical.
Extraordinary research published in Nature last September is being challenged by a paper set to be published in The Astrophysical Journal, a preprint of which is currently available at the arXiv. This is not the first paper to critique the apparent discovery of phosphine on Venus, and it’s probably not going to be the last.
That phosphine might be present on Venus was a revelation that blew our minds, and that’s because living organisms are one of the only known sources of the stinky gas. The team responsible for the apparent discovery, led by astronomer Jane Greaves from Cardiff University, found the evidence in spectral signals collected by two radio dishes: the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Spectral lines at certain wavelengths indicate the presence of specific chemicals, and in this case they implied the presence of phosphine in the Venusian cloud layer.
The authors of the Nature study were not claiming that life exists on Venus. Rather, they were asking the scientific community to explain their rather bizarre observation. Indeed, it was an exceptional claim, as it implied that Venus—one of the most inhospitable planets in the solar system—might actually be habitable, with microscopic organisms floating through the clouds.
Alas, this doesn’t appear to be the case.
“Instead of phosphine in the clouds of Venus, the data are consistent with an alternative hypothesis: They were detecting sulfur dioxide,” Victoria Meadows, a co-author of the new study and an astronomy professor at the University of Washington, explained in a statement. “Sulfur dioxide is the third-most-common chemical compound in Venus’ atmosphere, and it is not considered a sign of life.”
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Meadows, along with researchers from NASA, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Riverside, reached this conclusion by modeling conditions inside the Venusian atmosphere, which they did to re-interpret the radio data gathered by the original team.
“This is what’s known as a radiative transfer model, and it incorporates data from several decades’ worth of observations of Venus from multiple sources, including observatories here on Earth and spacecraft missions like Venus Express,” explained Andrew Lincowski, a researcher with the UW Department of Astronomy and the lead author of the paper, in the statement.
Equipped with the model, the researchers simulated spectral lines produced by phosphine and sulphur at multiple atmospheric altitudes on Venus, as well as how those signatures were received by ALMA and JCMT. Results showed that the shape of the signal, detected at 266.94 gigahertz, likely came from the Venusian mesosphere—an extreme height where sulphur dioxide can exist but phosphine cannot owing to the harsh conditions there, according to research. In fact, so extreme is this environment that phosphine wouldn’t last for more than a few seconds.
As the authors argue, the original researchers understated the amount of sulphur dioxide in the Venusian atmosphere and instead attributed the 266.94 gigahertz signal to phosphine (both phosphine and sulphur dioxide absorb radio waves around this frequency). This happened, according to the researchers, due to an “undesirable side-effect” known as spectral line dilution, study co-author and NASA JPL scientist Alex Akins explained in the statement.
“They inferred a low detection of sulfur dioxide because of [an] artificially weak signal from ALMA,” added Lincowski. “But our modeling suggests that the line-diluted ALMA data would have still been consistent with typical or even large amounts of Venus sulfur dioxide, which could fully explain the observed JCMT signal.”
This new result could prove devastating for the Nature paper, and it’ll be interesting to hear how the authors respond to this latest critique. That said, some scientists believe the writing is already on the wall, or more accurately, the trash bin.
“Already quickly after publication of the original work, we and others have put strong doubts on their analysis,” wrote Ignas Snellen, a professor at Leiden University, in an email. “Now, I personally think that this is the final nail in the coffin of the phosphine hypothesis. Of course, one can never prove that Venus is completely phosphine-free, but at least there is now no remaining evidence to suggest otherwise. I am sure that others will keep on looking though.”
Back in December, Snellen and his colleagues challenged the Nature study, arguing that the method used by the Greaves team resulted in a “spurious” high signal-to-noise ratio and that “no statistical evidence” exists for phosphine on Venus.
The apparent absence of phosphine on Venus, and thus the absence of any hints of microbial life, is far less interesting than the opposite, but that’s how it goes sometimes. Science makes no claims or promises about the interestingness of all things, and we, as defenders of the scientific method, must come to accept our unfolding universe as we find it.
We only wrote about the big new Fallout: New Vegas mod The Frontier last week when it was released! And now we’re writing about it again, because the mod has been “hidden” (basically temporarily removed) from Nexus Mods and pulled from its own website after allegations that one of its artists posted “animated pedophillic content on their personal artist accounts”.
The full statement, posted on the mod’s page by the development team, reads:
Some deeply concerning news has emerged in the past few hours. We have been recently notified that one of our developers, ZuTheSkunk, had posted animated pedophillic content on their personal artist accounts. The items in question are deeply disturbing to the entire team, and we condemn them in the strongest sense. ZuTheSkunk has since been removed from the Development Team and banned off of our Community Discord. We will be conducting dialogue with members of the development team to hear their thoughts regarding the current situation and help make our decision more informed. We have stopped production and work on the mod to address the current events properly. More measures will be undertaken and a more detailed address will be posted soon.
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed both in the mod, and outside of it, belong solely to the authors who write them, and not to the mod’s organization, community, or other group or individual.
ZuTheSkunk has a Deviantart account that’s still active, which is mostly made up of My Little Pony fan art, and which occasionally veers into sexual territory, though nothing of the magnitude alleged in the statement. There is, however, a now-deleted account at the more NSFW-leaning art website Fur Affinity called “ZuTheSkunk” that has been “deactivated by the owner”.
The mod is also unavailable on Steam, listed as simply being “Coming Soon”.
A strange outage is impacting internet users in the Northeast U.S. It’s not entirely clear what is going on, but it sure is annoying.
Around noon on Tuesday, outage reports began pouring in, according to DownDetector, which tracks online service outages. But it’s not limited to one company; users reported issues with Comcast, Google, Zoom, YouTube, Slack, Amazon Web Services, and many others. (AWS’s own status page indicates that its services are operating normally, for what it’s worth.)
While the cause (or causes) remains unconfirmed, a cut Verizon fiber optic cable in Brooklyn, New York, may be the culprit. Verizon’s customer support confirmed on Twitter that one of its cables had been severed, and customers said they received notice of the outage via email.
Not all services, nor all users, appeared to be affected equally. Even among the New York-based Gizmodo staff, the problem seems just… weird. One editor could access Slack fine, but Google services were down. Others experienced slower response times while still being able to access all services they attempted to use.
At the time of writing, several services, including Google and Zoom, appear to be coming back online. Others remain inaccessible for some users.
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Testing rainbow umbrella
Lorem ipsum dolor sit am ais aute irure dolor in reprehe nderittur adipissmod tempor dolore magna aliqua.
A Verizon spokesperson said in an email that they are looking into the issue.
An AWS spokesperson said the issue was related to an internet service provider and not AWS itself. In an email, a Google spokesperson echoed AWS, saying in a statement, “We are aware of reports regarding issues affecting access to some Google products, but have not found issues with our services. We’re continuing to investigate.”
We’ve also reached out to Comcast for clarity on the outage and will update when we hear back. If the outage is impacting you, let us know what you’re seeing in the comments.
Update 1:25 PM ET, Jan. 26: AWS confirmed that issues customers experienced were related to an internet service provider, not AWS. Google said it’s investigating the issue but has found no problems with its services.