One very wide, orange-jerseyed player takes the court. Oh, wait …Image: AP
We already knew that the NBA had too many uniforms, but the Thunder took things to a new level on Friday night against the Hawks, wearing different uniforms in each half of their game against Atlanta.
There was a good reason for the change, namely that the NBA has too many damn uniforms. The Hawks showed up on the court in Oklahoma City wearing their (checks notes) Icon Jerseys, while the Thunder donned their (checks notes again) Statement Jerseys.
Image: AP
The result was an incredibly stupid matchup of red against orange.
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Incredibly, the Thunder — the home team, with the ability to wear any uniform they could muster — tried to blame the fiasco on the Hawks “wearing the incorrect uniform color for the game.”
Apparently, the Hawks only brought red uniforms on their road trip, almost as if they thought they might be able to get away with such a zany concept as “road uniforms.” The Thunder might have been incredulous at this, but did graciously switch at halftime to white uniforms — no, sorry, (checks notes one more time) Association Jerseys.
The Thunder outscored the Hawks, 63-55, in orange, and edged Atlanta, 55-54, in white, for a 118-109 final.
The worst part of this is that it wasn’t just a freak occurrence. The uniform choices were made in advance and the situation was entirely avoidable.
In 2013, the Hawks-Knicks clash of red and orange was a much more understandable mistake. New York was wearing its orange alternates for just the fourth time, and NBA rules at the time required the home team to, get this, “wear light colored jerseys, and the visitors dark jerseys, unless otherwise approved.”
The orange had been designated as a light-colored alternate jersey, and NBA vice president Tim Frank declared, “Going forward, we’ll ensure that the opponent wears a more distinguishing color when the Knicks wear orange.”
He didn’t say anything about the Thunder wearing orange, though.
Sorry, not orange. “Sunset.” Is this a basketball league or an L.L. Bean catalog?
Although its main mission is staring at the Sun, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will take any opportunity to send data back home to Earth.
The planet Venus represents just such an opportunity, or rather, seven of them. Seven times during its mission, the probe will swing around Venus for a gravity assist, using the planet’s gravity as a slingshot for course and speed corrections as it edges closer and closer to the Sun.
The solar probe made the third of these maneuvers on 11 July 2020, and as it approached, it took a glamour shot of the planet’s night side using the Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument.
Parker isn’t the only probe to take pics of Venus as it wends its way through the inner Solar System. BepiColombo, a joint European and Japanese space agency Mercury probe, took a video of Venus as it made a gravity assist maneuver last year.
BepiColombo’s Venus flyby. (ESA/BepiColombo/MTM)
Those images show the planet as relatively smooth and featureless. That’s not at all surprising – Venus is shrouded by a thick, toxic atmosphere with clouds of mainly sulfuric acid that reflect about 70 percent of the light that hits them. That’s why Venus is one of the brightest objects in the night sky.
The Parker team expected to see a similarly featureless orb – but that’s not what they saw when they processed the WISPR data.
If you look at the image, you can see a bright glow around the rim of the planet. That, the team believes, is nightglow.
This is produced by atoms in the upper atmosphere. On the planet’s dayside, solar radiation splits upper atmosphere carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon monoxide. When night falls, the atoms recombine into carbon dioxide, causing a glow.
This is something that also occurs on Earth, and Mars, and it’s been seen before on Venus; its presence in the Parker image is not surprising.
Nor are the white streaks – while the Parker team isn’t sure what they are, there are a number of candidates, including dust, cosmic rays, material ejected from the spacecraft after being hit by dust, or a combination of all of those.
(NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory/Guillermo Stenborg and Brendan Gallagher)
What is surprising is that dark smear on the planet’s face. That’s a region called the Aphrodite Terra, the largest highland region on the surface of the planet.
WISPR, designed to image the solar corona and coronal ejections, is optimized for visible light observations – yet somehow it peered through Venus’ clouds.
The scientists think they know what happened, though. Venus currently has one active mission, the Japanese Space Agency’s Akatsuki probe. It sends back similar images, taken using its infrared camera, sensitive to temperature variations.
The Aphrodite Terra, with its higher altitude, is a lot cooler than the surrounding terrain, so in infrared or near-infrared images of the planet, it would be visible.
“WISPR effectively captured the thermal emission of the Venusian surface,” said astrophysicist and WISPR team member Brian Wood of the US Naval Research Laboratory. “It’s very similar to images acquired by the Akatsuki spacecraft at near-infrared wavelengths.”
This means WISPR could be more sensitive to infrared light than it was designed to be – which, in turn, opens up new possibilities for Parker’s main mission of studying the Sun. The Parker team is currently taking a closer look at the instrument’s specs to figure out what, exactly, it did.
“Either way,” said WISPR project scientist Angelos Vourlidas of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, “some exciting science opportunities await us.”
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon astronaut taxi is doing “beautifully” so far in its first operational, long-duration stay on the International Space Station, NASA’s human spaceflight chief Kathy Lueders told The Verge. The capsule, named Resilience, sent three NASA astronauts and a Japanese astronaut to the station last November, and a trivial housekeeping task is the only unexpected hiccup faced by the crew.
“We’ve been very, very happy with how things are going,” Lueders said in an interview. “The only minor thing we had was we’re getting some little bits of lint on the seal” where Crew Dragon connects to the ISS, she added. Astronauts have been floating in and out of the spacecraft for months, leaving behind a buildup of lint and dust.
SpaceX launched the Crew-1 mission on November 15th carrying Commander Mike Hopkins, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi, a Japanese astronaut. The mission marked SpaceX’s first fully operational mission under its NASA contract after nailing its final test milestone last summer with the launch and return of two US astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley.
Some extra dust is definitely not the worst problem NASA and SpaceX could face on a $100 billion orbital laboratory that has housed astronauts in low Earth orbit for over 20 years. “I can handle having housekeeping issues,” Lueders said. Astronauts have been using a vacuum to suck out all the lint, but for a longer-term fix to the pileup, a tiny cover was trucked to the station on the NG-15 cargo resupply mission, launched Saturday by Northrop Grumman.
NASA and SpaceX have been closely monitoring Crew Dragon’s health in space as it tallies 98 days docked to the ISS — the longest duration for a human-rated US spacecraft. Perhaps most intimately familiar with the capsule is Hopkins, who’s been using Crew Dragon as his bunking quarters while others sleep elsewhere on the station. (Lueders made clear that Hopkins wasn’t solely to blame for all the dust — “don’t make me get in trouble with Mike Hopkins, Joey!”)
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon “Resilience” spacecraft is seen docked to the International Space Station’s Harmony module.Image: NASA / Johnson Space Center
SpaceX’s next mission, Crew-2, is slated for April 20th, reusing the capsule that flew Behnken and Hurley for the DM-2 mission. NASA decided to allow SpaceX to reuse its capsules for astronaut flights last year, setting the stage for a rigorous refurbishment and certification process for SpaceX. It’s similar to what the agency will go through with Boeing’s Starliner, Crew Dragon’s rival capsule that’s still in development.
That refurb process will take place in Florida, where the company used to refurbish its old Cargo Dragon vehicles. Lueders said SpaceX engineers call their Kennedy Space Center refurbishment facilities “Dragonland.” SpaceX has already added infrastructure for Crew Dragon refurbishment.
NASA still needs a backup seat
Even though Crew Dragon Resilience is doing well on the ISS, and the upcoming Crew-2 launch is on schedule for April, NASA still wants to have a backup plan. The station’s other three crew members are two Russian cosmonauts and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, who are due to return to Earth in April on the same Soyuz capsule they rode in on last year. If the Crew-2 spacecraft runs into problems before its April flight, NASA will need another option to get an astronaut to the ISS. Otherwise, they risk leaving the station with no NASA crew members for the first time since the station was first occupied in 2000.
The agency announced earlier this month that it’s seeking another seat on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft as a safety net. The Verge reported that NASA was in talks with space infrastructure startup Axiom Space to book that Soyuz seat, instead of buying directly from the Russians — only the second time in the decades-long NASA-Russia relationship to do so.
Lueders said the US company (without specifically naming Axiom, because the talks were ongoing) reached out to NASA with its own proposal and offered the backup solution. So, as a legal formality, NASA issued a notice saying it’s looking to buy a Soyuz seat because — as Lueders put it — “one of our commercial providers out there said ‘Hey, there’s a commercial opportunity for me here,’ so they gave us an unsolicited proposal.”
Axiom’s chief executive, Michael Suffredini, co-founded the Houston-based company in 2016 after spending 10 years as NASA’s ISS program manager. It’s unclear whether Axiom had already owned the Soyuz seat it’s selling to NASA or whether the Houston-based company is currently going through the process with Roscosmos to buy it. Roscosmos (Russia’s space agency) and Axiom both declined to comment.
No matter the arrangement, the dealmaking and seat swapping is poised to give NASA the assurance it needs to keep a US astronaut on the ISS. NASA and the State Department are “in the final stages” of coming up with an agreement with Roscosmos to fly Russian cosmonauts on future flights of SpaceX’s or Boeing’s capsules in exchange for flying more US astronauts on Soyuz spacecraft, Lueders said. Nailing that agreement has been a yearslong process.
“We were hoping it would happen a little bit sooner, and so unfortunately it wasn’t happening in time for the April Soyuz seat,” Lueders said. That delay gave Axiom a chance to make a deal.
“If you said, ‘Kathy, what’s your logistics dream?’ I would say every vehicle going up to the ISS needs to have a US crew member on it, and we believe every US vehicle going up to have a Russian crew member on it,” Lueders said.
Correction February 22, 1:20PM ET: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated a cargo version of Crew Dragon that launched in January was the same spacecraft used in a previous uncrewed test mission, DM-1. The DM-1 spacecraft was destroyed in a testing explosion in 2019, and the cargo Crew Dragon was a new vehicle.
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Despite creating a Super Bowl advertisement that has been ripped apart by critics, vegan dairy product maker Oatly’s investment may have actually been money well spent.
The Sweden-based company is reportedly eyeing a $10 billion valuation for an initial public offering that could come as early as May. That is a far cry from the $2 billion that the Wall Street Journal reported the company was worth back in July.
Sources told Bloomberg about the rise in numbers and that discussions are continuing regarding the size and timing of the listing on the New York Stock Exchange. While Oatly has mulled a listing in Hong Kong, after its Super Bowl splash, the focus now appears to on moving ahead with only a U.S. listing. An Oatly spokesperson declined to comment.
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Oatly’s 30-second Super Bowl ad featured the company’s CEO Toni Peterson playing a keyboard and singing in an oat field about the company’s milk.
“It’s like milk, but made for humans,” Peterson belted.”Wow, now cow!”
According to Ad Age, Oatly’s commercial was made back in 2014 and banned in Sweden after facing a lawsuit from the Swedish dairy lobby. A 15-second version of the commercial has been posted on Oatly’s YouTube channel since 2017. Variety reported that a 30-second ad for Super Bowl LV cost about $5.5 million.
“No choreography, music licensing, famous actors — possibly even no director. This year’s jankiest ad came from Oatly, a company that is very good at making oat milk and very bad at making commercials,” the Washington Post wrote. “Uncomfortably awkward “Napoleon Dynamite” vibes abound.”
Slate’s Justin Peters said the ad earned the “What the Hell Was That?” award for 2021.
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“This ad smacked of the sort of inauthentic weirdness that just ends up reading as smug,” Peters wrote. “While I enjoy Oatly’s products, I confess to not getting or liking the company’s schtick of producing ads that very self-consciously and deliberately choose to waste the space that they’ve purchased.”
Likewise, the ad faced similar pushback on social media, with one user suggesting the ad was “made bad on purpose so people would talk about them.”
Oatly, which called the backlash a ‘popular opinion’, capitalized on the moment by selling t-shirts that read “I totally hated that Oatly commercial.” According to the company, the shirts are now sold out.
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However, some users came to the commercial’s defense, like musician QuestLove, who said Oatly’s spot “won” with an “inescapable song.” Others users said it was their “favorite commercial so far” and thought the jingle was “kinda nice [to be honest].”
“Maybe interrupting the second quarter so the world could experience Toni’s musical stylings about how oatmilk is like milk but made for humans wasn’t the most Super Bowl-ish idea ever, but on the other hand, our attempt to promote Toni’s singing skills to a wider audience actually got you to visit an oatmilk company website on the big day,” Oatly said in a statement on its website. “Total success!”
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Oatly AB was founded back in the 1990s by brothers Rickard and Bjorn Oste. Using patented enzyme technology based on Swedish research from Lund University, the company turns fiber rich oats into nutritional liquid food.
The company’s popularity comes as plant-based alternatives to traditional meat and dairy products have pushed their way into the mainstream. Both Starbucks and Dunkin’ announced last year that they would add oat milk to their menus. Starbucks also announced a deal with Oatly to introduce its products in markets such as Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Taiwan and Thailand.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Oatly AB sold a $200 million stake in July to Blackstone Group, a private equity firm headed by Trump donor Stephen Schwartzman. The investment is also reportedly backed by Oprah Winfrey, Natalie Portman, former Starbucks Corp. Chief Howard Schultz and the entertainment company founded by Jay-Z.
Oatly’s potential IPO plans come amid a similar effort by rival Chobani. The yogurt company is reportedly eyeing an initial public offering later this year that it hopes could value the Norwich, N.Y., company at as much as $7 billion to $10 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has since spoken with PM Scott Morrison about the new rules
Sydney:
Software giant Microsoft Corp is confident its search product Bing can fill the gap in Australia if Google pulls its search over required payments to media outlets, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Monday.
Australia has introduced laws that would force internet giant Google and social media heavyweight Facebook Inc to negotiate payments to domestic media outlets whose content links drive traffic to their platforms.
However, the Big Tech firms have called the laws unworkable and said last month they would withdraw key services from Australia if the regulations went ahead. Those services include Google’s search engine, which has 94% of the country’s search market, according to industry data.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has since spoken with Morrison about the new rules, the tech company told Reuters, and on Monday, Morrison said the software company was ready to grow the presence of its search tool Bing, the distant No. 2 player.
“I can tell you, Microsoft’s pretty confident, when I spoke to Satya,” Morrison told reporters in Canberra, without giving further detail of the conversation.
“We just want the rules in the digital world to be the same that exist in the real world, in the physical world,” Morrison added.
A Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed the discussion took place but declined to comment, because the company was not directly involved in the laws.
“We recognise the importance of a vibrant media sector and public interest journalism in a democracy and we recognise the challenges the media sector has faced over many years through changing business models and consumer preferences,” the spokeswoman said.
A Google representative was not immediately available for comment.
A day earlier, Australian treasurer Josh Frydenberg said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had requested a meeting over the law, and that they had talked, but that he would not back down on the change.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
With all of its recent licensed characters, which includes everyone from Sarah Connor to The Mandalorian, the virtual battlefield of Fortnite is starting to resemble a playground full of action figures. When you think about it like that, a collaboration with G.I. Joe makes a lot of sense. With that in mind, Epic and Hasbro announced that iconic character Snake Eyes will be available as part of the Fortnite universe starting today — both in-game and as a physical toy.
The new version of the character is called Snake Eyes: Zero Point edition, an allusion to a key part of Fortnite lore (one which took on more significance this season). The in-game version will be available starting on January 30th for 1,800 V-bucks, while a 6-inch-tall action figure is also available to preorder for $39.99 via Hasbro Pulse. Hasbro says that the figure will feature accessories inspired by “the rich history of the Snake Eyes character” as well as a few that will be familiar to Fortnite fans, like the classic Boogie Bomb.
There have already been plenty of toys and figures based on Fortnite’s original characters, of course, but this collaboration hints at something different, as licensing deals become a bigger part of the battle royale. Next stop, metaverse.
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Argentina’s groundbreaking abortion law goes into force Sunday under the watchful eyes of women’s groups and government officials, who hope to ensure its full implementation despite opposition from some conservative and church groups.
Argentina became the largest nation in Latin America to legalize elective abortion after its Senate on Dec. 30 passed a law guaranteeing the procedure up to the 14th week of pregnancy and beyond that in cases of rape or when a woman’s health is at risk.
The vote was hailed as a triumph for the South American country’s feminist movement that could pave the way for similar actions across the socially conservative, heavily Roman Catholic region.
But Pope Francis had issued a last-minute appeal before the vote and church leaders have criticized the decision. Supporters of the law say they expect lawsuits from anti-abortion groups in Argentina’s conservative provinces and some private health clinics might refuse to carry out the procedure.
“Another huge task lies ahead of us,” said Argentina’s minister of women, gender and diversity, Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta, who has acknowledged there will be obstacles to the law’s full implementation across the country.
Gómez Alcorta said a telephone line will be set up “for those who cannot access abortion to communicate.”
The Argentine Catholic Church has repudiated the law and conservative doctors’ and lawyers’ groups have urged resistance. Doctors and health professionals can claim conscientious objection to performing abortions, but cannot invoke the right if a pregnant woman’s life or health is in danger.
A statement signed by the Consortium of Catholic Doctors, the Catholic Lawyers Corporation and other groups called on doctors and lawyers to “resist with nobility, firmness and courage the norm that legalizes the abominable crime of abortion.”
The anti-abortion group Unidad Provida also urged doctors, nurses and technicians to fight for their “freedom of conscience” and promised to “accompany them in all the trials that are necessary.”
Under the law, private health centers that do not have doctors willing to carry out abortions must refer women seeking abortions to clinics that will. Any public official or health authority who unjustifiably delays an abortion will be punished with imprisonment from three months to one year.
The National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion, an umbrella group for organizations that for years fought for legal abortion, often wearing green scarves at protests, vowed to “continue monitoring compliance with the law.”
“We trust the feminist networks that we have built over decades,” said Laura Salomé, one of the movement’s members.
A previous abortion bill was voted down by Argentine lawmakers in 2018 by a narrow margin. But in the December vote it was backed by the center-left government, boosted by the so-called “piba” revolution, from the Argentine slang for “girls,” and opinion polls showing opposition had softened.
The law’s supporters expect backlash in Argentina’s conservative provinces. In the northern province of Salta, a federal judge this week rejected a measure filed by a former legislator calling for the law to be suspended because the legislative branch had exceeded its powers. Opponents of abortion cite international treaties signed by Argentina pledging to protect life from conception.
Gómez Alcorta said criminal charges currently pending against more than 1,500 women and doctors who performed abortions should be lifted. She said the number of women and doctors detained “was not that many,” but didn’t provide a number.
“The Ministry of Women is going to carry out its leadership” to end these cases, she said.
Tamara Grinberg, 32, who had a clandestine abortion in 2012, celebrated that from now on “a girl can go to a hospital to say ‘I want to have an abortion.’”
She said when she had her abortion, very few people helped her. “Today there are many more support networks … and the decision is respected. When I did it, no one respected my decision.”
While abortion is already allowed in some other parts of Latin America — such as in Uruguay, Cuba and Mexico City — its legalization in Argentina is expected to reverberate across the region, where dangerous clandestine procedures remain the norm a half century after a woman’s right to choose was guaranteed in the U.S.
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AP journalists Víctor Caivano and Yésica Brumec contributed to this report.
