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      Netflix drops One Piece S2 teaser, renews for S3

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 11 August

    We have the first teaser for the second season of Netflix's live-action series adaptation of One Piece , subtitled Into the Grand Line . The streaming platform also released some first-look images and announced that the series has been renewed for a third season.

    (Some spoilers for S1 below.)

    As previously reported , the original One Piece manga debuted in 1997, following the adventures of one Monkey D. Luffy, who heads a motley crew called the Straw Hat Pirates. There's swordsman Roronoa Zoro, thief and navigator Nami, sniper and compulsive liar Usopp, and a cook named Sanji. They're searching for the legendary One Piece, a mythical treasure that would make anyone who possesses it King of the Pirates. Monkey wants to be the Pirate King, but so do a host of other pirates with their own ships and crews.

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      How old is the earliest trace of life on Earth?

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 11 August

    The question of when life began on Earth is as old as human culture.

    “It's one of these fundamental human questions: When did life appear on Earth?” said Professor Martin Whitehouse of the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

    So when some apparently biological carbon was dated to at least 3.95 billion years ago —making it the oldest remains of life on Earth—the claim sparked interest and skepticism in equal measure, as Ars Technica reported in 2017 .

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      NASA plans to build a nuclear reactor on the Moon—a space lawyer explains why

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 10 August

    The first space race was about flags and footprints. Now, decades later, landing on the Moon is old news. The new race is to build there, and doing so hinges on power.

    In April 2025, China reportedly unveiled plans to build a nuclear power plant on the Moon by 2035. This plant would support its planned international lunar research station . The United States countered in August, when acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy reportedly suggested a US reactor would be operational on the Moon by 2030.

    While it might feel like a sudden sprint, this isn’t exactly breaking news. NASA and the Department of Energy have spent years quietly developing small nuclear power systems to power lunar bases, mining operations, and long-term habitats.

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      Encryption made for police and military radios may be easily cracked

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 9 August

    Two years ago, researchers in the Netherlands discovered an intentional backdoor in an encryption algorithm baked into radios used by critical infrastructure–as well as police, intelligence agencies, and military forces around the world–that made any communication secured with the algorithm vulnerable to eavesdropping.

    When the researchers publicly disclosed the issue in 2023, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), which developed the algorithm, advised anyone using it for sensitive communication to deploy an end-to-end encryption solution on top of the flawed algorithm to bolster the security of their communications.

    But now the same researchers have found that at least one implementation of the end-to-end encryption solution endorsed by ETSI has a similar issue that makes it equally vulnerable to eavesdropping. The encryption algorithm used for the device they examined starts with a 128-bit key, but this gets compressed to 56 bits before it encrypts traffic, making it easier to crack. It’s not clear who is using this implementation of the end-to-end encryption algorithm, nor if anyone using devices with the end-to-end encryption is aware of the security vulnerability in them.

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      New adhesive surface modeled on a remora works underwater

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 9 August

    Most adhesives can’t stick to wet surfaces because water and other fluids disrupt the adhesive’s bonding mechanisms. This problem, though, has been beautifully solved by evolution in remora suckerfish, which use an adhesive disk on top of their heads to attach to animals like dolphins, sharks, and even manta rays.

    A team of MIT scientists has now taken a close look at these remora disks and reverse-engineered them. “Basically, we looked at nature for inspiration,” says Giovanni Traverso, a professor at MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering and senior author of the study.

    Sticking Variety

    Remora adhesive disks are an evolutionary adaptation of the fish’s first dorsal fin, the one that in other species sits on top of the body, just behind the head and gill covers. The disk rests on an intercalary backbone—a bone structure that most likely evolved from parts of the spine. This bony structure supports lamellae, specialized bony plates with tiny backward-facing spikes called spinules. The entire disk is covered with soft tissue compartments that are open at the top. “This makes the remora fish adhere very securely to soft-bodied, fast-moving marine hosts,” Traverso says.

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      James Lovell, the steady astronaut who brought Apollo 13 home safely, has died

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 9 August

    James Lovell, a member of humanity's first trip to the moon and commander of NASA's ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, has died at the age of 97.

    Lovell's death on Thursday was announced by the space agency.

    "NASA sends its condolences to the family of Capt. Jim Lovell, whose life and work inspired millions of people across the decades," said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy in a statement on Friday. "Jim's character and steadfast courage helped our nation reach the moon and turned a potential tragedy into a success from which we learned an enormous amount. We mourn his passing even as we celebrate his achievements."

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      For giant carnivorous dinosaurs, big size didn’t mean a big bite

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 8 August • 1 minute

    When a Spinosaurus attacked a T. rex in Jurassic Park III , both giant carnivores tried to finish the fight with one powerful bite of their bone-crushing jaws. The Spinosaurus won, because when the movie was being made back in the early 2000s,  fossil discoveries suggested it was the largest carnivorous dinosaur that ever lived. But new research provides evidence that size and weight didn’t always create a powerful bite.

    “The Spinosaurus and the T. rex didn’t live at the same time at the same continent, but if they did, I don’t really see the Spinosaurus winning,” says Andre Rowe, a paleobiologist at the University of Bristol. He led a study analyzing the biomechanics of skulls belonging to the largest carnivorous dinosaurs. Based on his findings, T. rex was most likely was the apex predator we’ve always believed it to be. The story of other giant carnivorous dinosaurs, though, was a bit more complicated.

    Staring down the giants

    “Of the giant carnivore dinosaurs, T. rex is the one we know the most about because it has a pretty good fossil record,” Rowe says. There are many complete skulls which have already been scanned and analyzed, and this is how we know the T. rex had an extremely high bite force—one of the highest known in the animal kingdom. We have far fewer fossil records of other giant carnivores like Spinosaurus or Allosaurus , so we assumed they were similar to T. rex .

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      Texas prepares for war as invasion of flesh-eating flies appears imminent

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 8 August

    Texas is gearing up for war as a savage, flesh-eating fly appears poised for a US invasion and is expanding its range of victims.

    On Friday, the Texas Department of Agriculture announced the debut of TDA Swormlure , a synthetic bait designed to attract the flies with a scent that mimics open flesh wounds, which are critical to the lifecycle of the fly, called the New World Screwworm. The parasite exploits any open wound or orifice on a wide range of warm-blooded animals to feed its ravenous spawn. Female flies lay hundreds of eggs in even the tiniest abrasion. From there, screw-shaped larvae—which give the flies their name—emerge to literally twist and bore into their victim, eating them alive and causing a putrid, life-threatening lesion.

    The new lure for the flies is just one of several defense efforts in Texas, which stands to suffer heavy losses from an invasion. Screwworms are a ferocious foe to many animals, but are particularly devastating to livestock.

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      X-Men at 25 is more relevant than ever

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 20 July

    Twenty-five years ago, X-Men became a summer blockbuster and effectively re-energized a then-flagging market for superhero movies, which have dominated the industry (for better and worse) ever since. It's still a vastly entertaining film, with great characters, a zippy pace, and plenty of action. And its broader themes still strongly resonate with viewers today.

    (Many spoilers below.)

    In the mid-1990s, the popularity of the animated X-Men TV series caught the attention of 20th Century Fox (now 20th Century Studios ), who purchased the rights from a cash-strapped Marvel Comics and hired Bryan Singer ( The Usual Suspects ) to direct. At the time, the project was perceived by some as a bit risky, given waning Hollywood interest in the genre after 1997's disastrously campy Batman and Robin . But the gamble paid off: X-Men was a major hit, spawning its own franchise and ultimately the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

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