Cottman Avenue in northern Philadelphia is a busy but slightly down-on-its-luck urban thoroughfare that has had a strange couple of years.

You might remember the truly bizarre 2020 press conference held—for no discernible reason—at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a half block off Cottman Avenue, where a not-yet-disbarred Rudy Giuliani led an farcical ensemble of characters in an event so weird it has been immortalized in its own, quite lengthy, Wikipedia article.

Then in 2023, a truck carrying gasoline caught fire just a block away, right where Cottman passes under I-95. The resulting fire damaged I-95 in both directions, bringing down several lanes and closing I-95 completely for some time. (This also generated a Wikipedia article.)

This year, on January 31, a little further west on Cottman, a Learjet 55 medevac flight crashed one minute after takeoff from Northeast Philadelphia Airport. The plane, fully loaded with fuel for a trip to Springfield, Missouri, came down near a local mall, clipped a commercial sign, and exploded in a fireball when it hit the ground. The crash generated a debris field 1,410 feet long and 840 feet wide, according to the National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB), and it killed six people on the plane and one person on the ground.

The crash was important enough to attract the attention of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. (The airplane crew and passengers were all Mexican citizens; they were transporting a young patient who had just wrapped up treatment at a Philadelphia hospital.) And yes, it too generated a Wikipedia article.

NTSB has been investigating ever since, hoping to determine the cause of the accident. Tracking data showed that the flight reached an altitude of 1,650 feet before plunging to earth, but the plane's pilots never conveyed any distress to the local air traffic control tower.

Investigators searched for the plane's cockpit voice recorder, which might provide clues as to what was happening in the cockpit during the crash. The Learjet did have such a recorder, though it was an older, tape-based model. (Newer ones are solid-state, with fewer moving parts.) Still, even this older tech should have recorded the last 30 minutes of audio, and these units are rated to withstand impacts of 3,400 Gs and to survive fires of 1,100° Celsius (2,012° F) for a half hour. Which was important, given that the plane had both burst into flames and crashed directly into the ground.

Cockpit voice recorders are amazingly hardened bits of tech. They are often kept in the back of the plane, so as to better survive a crash, but their audio comes from a microphone usually found on the instrument panel above and between the two pilot stations. The utility of this recording does not come just from what the pilots might say; the sound of a stall warning indicator or landing gear retraction or engine noise could each allow investigators to infer things about the flight's last moments.

The NTSB eventually found the cockpit voice recorder of the Learjet 55, which was inside the impact crater and buried "under 8 ft of soil and debris." The unit was pretty beat up—or, as the government puts it, displayed "significant impact-related damage as well as liquid ingress." So NTSB sent the device to its Vehicle Recorders Laboratory in Washington, DC, hoping to salvage some of the audio.

The CVR after recovery from the north Philly crash site.

After "extensive repair and cleaning," technicians were able to listen to the tape... and they found to their chagrin that it contained nothing related to the accident. In a preliminary report on the plane crash, released last week, NTSB investigators said that "the CVR did not record the accident flight and during the audition it was determined that the CVR had likely not been recording audio for several years." Even the most hardened, comically over-specced devices can fail—and sometimes it's not even the fire, the impact, or the "liquid ingress" that brings them down.

Still, NTSB is not out of options. The Learjet contained another important piece of tech: an Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS) computer. The device may contain crash data in nonvolatile memory, and it has been shipped off to its manufacturer to see what, if anything, can be recovered.

Read full article

Comments

Canadian travellers to the U.S. will be exempt from new fingerprinting requirements imposed on all other foreign nationals, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

A Canadian brewer hopes a massive crate of beer will help customers deal with the exhausting news cycle under U.S. President Donald Trump. Moosehead's Presidential Pack contains 1,461 beers, in 473-millilitre cans — marketed as "just enough Canadian lagers to get through a full presidential term."

The giant extinct shark species known as the megalodon has captured the interest of scientists and the general public alike, even inspiring the 2018 blockbuster film The Meg. The species lived some 3.6 million years ago, and no complete skeleton has yet been found. So there has been considerable debate among paleobiologists about megalodon's size, body shape, and swimming speed, among other characteristics.

While some researchers have compared megalodon to a gigantic version of the stocky great white shark, others believe the species had a more slender body shape. A new paper published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica bolsters the latter viewpoint, also drawing conclusions about the megalodon's body mass, swimming speed (based on hydrodynamic principles), and growth patterns.

As previously reported, the largest shark alive today, reaching up to 20 meters long, is the whale shark, a sedate filter feeder. As recently as 4 million years ago, however, sharks of that scale likely included the fast-moving predator megalodon (formally Otodus megalodon). Due to incomplete fossil data, we're not entirely sure how large megalodon were and can only make inferences based on some of their living relatives.

Thanks to research published in 2023 on its fossilized teeth, we're now fairly confident that megalodon shared something else with these relatives: it wasn't entirely cold-blooded and kept its body temperature above that of the surrounding ocean. Most sharks, like most fish, are ectothermic, meaning that their body temperatures match those of the surrounding water. But a handful of species, part of a group termed mackerel sharks, are endothermic: They have a specialized pattern of blood circulation that helps retain some of the heat their muscles produce. This enables them to keep some body parts at a higher temperature than their surroundings.

Of particular relevance to this latest paper is a 2022 study by Jack Cooper of Swansea University in the UK and his co-authors. In 2020, the team reconstructed a 2D model of the megalodon, basing the dimensions on similar existing shark species. The researchers followed up in 2022 with a reconstructed 3D model, extrapolating the dimensions from a megalodon specimen (a vertebral column) in Belgium. Cooper concluded that a megalodon would have been a stocky, powerful shark—measuring some 52 feet (16 meters) in length with a body mass of 67.86 tons—able to execute bursts of high speed to attack prey, much like the significantly smaller great white shark.

(H) One of the largest vertebrae of <em>Otodus megalodon</em>; (I and J) CT scans showing cross-sectional views. Credit: Shimada et al., 2025

Not everyone agreed, however, Last year, a team of 26 shark experts led by Kenshu Shimada, a paleobiologist at DePaul University, further challenged the great white shark comparison, arguing that the supersized creature's body was more slender and possibly even longer than researchers previously thought. The team concluded that based on the spinal column, the combination of a great white build with the megalodon's much longer length would have simply proved too cumbersome.

A fresh approach

Now Shimada is back with a fresh analysis, employing a new method that he says provides independent lines of evidence for the megalodon's slender build. "Our new study does not use the modern great white shark as a model, but rather simply asks, 'How long were the head and tail based on the trunk [length] represented by the fossil vertebral column?' using the general body plan seen collectively in living and fossil sharks," Shimada told Ars.

Shimada and his co-authors measured the proportions of 145 modern and 20 extinct species of shark, particularly the head, trunk, and tail relative to total body length. Megalodon was represented by a Belgian vertebral specimen. The largest vertebra in that specimen measured 15.5 centimeters (6 inches) in diameter, although there are other megalodon vertebrae in Denmark, for example, with diameters as much as 23 centimeters (9 inches).

Based on their analysis, Shimada et al concluded that, because the trunk section of the Belgian specimen measured 11 meters, the head and tail were probably about 1.8 meters (6 feet) and 3.6 meters (12 feet) long, respectively, with a total body length of 16.4 meters (54 feet) for this particularly specimen. That means the Danish megalodon specimens could have been as long as 24.3 meters (80 feet). As for body shape, taking the new length estimates into account, the lemon shark appears to be the closest modern analogue. "However, the exact position and shape of practically all the fins remain uncertain," Shimada cautioned. "We are only talking about the main part of the body."

Credit: DePaul University/Kenshu Shimada

The team also found that a 24.3-meter-long megalodon would have weighed 94 tons with an estimated swimming speed of 2.1–3.5 kph (1.3–2.2 mph). They also studied growth patterns evident in the Belgian vertebrae, concluding that the megalodon would give live birth and that the newborns would be between 3.6 to 3.9 meters (12–13 feet) long—i.e., roughly the size of a great white shark. The authors see this as a refutation of the hypothesis that megalodon relied on nursery areas to rear their young, since a baby megalodon would be quite capable of hunting and killing marine mammals based on size alone.

In addition, "We unexpectedly unlocked the mystery of why certain aquatic vertebrates can attain gigantic sizes while others cannot," Shimada said. "Living gigantic sharks, such as the whale shark and basking shark, as well as many other gigantic aquatic vertebrates like whales have slender bodies because large stocky bodies are hydrodynamically inefficient for swimming."

That's in sharp contrast to the great white shark, whose stocky body becomes even stockier as it grows. "It can be 'large' but cannot [get] past 7 meters (23 feet) to be 'gigantic' because of hydrodynamic constraints," said Shimada. "We also demonstrate that the modern great white shark with a stocky body hypothetically blown up to the size of megalodon would not allow it to be an efficient swimmer due to the hydrodynamic constraints, further supporting the idea that it is more likely than not that megalodon must have had a much slenderer body than the modern great white shark."

Shimada emphasized that their interpretations remain tentative but they are based on hard data and make for useful reference points for future research.

An “exciting working hypothesis”

For his part, Cooper found a lot to like in Shimada et al.'s latest analysis. "I'd say everything presented here is interesting and presents an exciting working hypothesis but that these should also be taken with a grain of salt until they can either be empirically tested, or a complete skeleton of megalodon is found to confirm one way or the other," Cooper told Ars. "Generally, I appreciate the paper's approach to its body size calculation in that it uses a lot of different shark species and doesn't make any assumptions as to which species are the best analogues to megalodon."

Shark biologists now say a lemon shark, like this one, is a better model of the extinct megalodon's body than the great white shark. Credit: Albert Kok

Cooper acknowledged that it makes sense that a megalodon would be slightly slower than a great white given its sheer size, "though it does indicate we've got a shark capable of surprisingly fast speeds for its size," he said. As for Shimada's new growth model, he pronounced it "really solid" and concurred with the findings on birthing with one caveat. "I think the refutation of nursery sites is a bit of a leap, though I understand the temptation given the remarkably large size of the baby sharks," he said. "We have geological evidence of multiple nurseries—not just small teeth, but also geological evidence of the right environmental conditions."

He particularly liked Shimada et al.'s final paragraph. "[They] call out 'popular questions' along the lines of, 'Was megalodon stronger than Livyatan?'" said Cooper. "I agree with the authors that these sorts of questions—ones we all often get asked by 'fans' on social media—are really not productive, as these unscientific questions disregard the rather amazing biology we've learned about this iconic, real species that existed, and reduce it to what I can only describe as a video game character."

Regardless of how this friendly ongoing debate plays out, our collective fascination with megalodon is likely to persist. "It's the imagining of such a magnificently enormous shark swimming around our oceans munching on whales, and considering that geologically speaking this happened in the very recent past," said Cooper of the creature's appeal. "It really captures what evolution can achieve, and even the huge size of their teeth alone really put it into perspective."

Palaeontologia Electronica, 2025. DOI: 10.26879/1502  (About DOIs).

Read full article

Comments

A 55-year-old software developer faces up to 10 years in prison for deploying malicious code that sabotaged his former employer's network, allegedly costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses.

The US Department of Justice announced Friday that Davis Lu was convicted by a jury after "causing intentional damage to protected computers" reportedly owned by the Ohio- and Dublin-based power management company Eaton Corp.

Lu had worked at Eaton Corp. for about 11 years when he apparently became disgruntled by a corporate "realignment" in 2018 that "reduced his responsibilities," the DOJ said.

His efforts to sabotage their network began that year, and by the next year, he had planted different forms of malicious code, creating "infinite loops" that deleted coworker profile files, preventing legitimate logins and causing system crashes, the DOJ explained. Aiming to slow down or ruin Eaton Corp.'s productivity, Lu named these codes using the Japanese word for destruction, "Hakai," and the Chinese word for lethargy, "HunShui," the DOJ said.

But perhaps nothing was as destructive as the "kill switch" Lu designed to shut down everything if he was ever terminated.

This kill switch, the DOJ said, appeared to have been created by Lu because it was named "IsDLEnabledinAD," which is an apparent abbreviation of "Is Davis Lu enabled in Active Directory." It also "automatically activated" on the day of Lu's termination in 2019, the DOJ said, disrupting Eaton Corp. users globally.

Eaton Corp. discovered the malicious code while trying to end the infinite looping causing the systems to crash. They soon realized the code was being executed from a computer using Lu's user ID, a court filing said, and running on a server that only Lu, as a software developer, had access to. On that same server, other malicious code was found, including the code deleting user profile data and activating the kill switch, the filing said.

Additionally, the DOJ rooted through Lu's search history and found evidence that "he had researched methods to escalate privileges, hide processes, and rapidly delete files, indicating an intent to obstruct efforts of his co-workers to resolve the system disruptions."

According to the filing, Lu admitted to investigators that he created the code causing "infinite loops." But he's "disappointed" in the jury's verdict and plans to appeal, his attorney, Ian Friedman, told Cleveland.com.

"Davis and his supporters believe in his innocence, and this matter will be reviewed at the appellate level," Friedman said.

A sentencing date has not been set yet, the DOJ said.

Read full article

Comments

HBO released a one-minute teaser of the hotly anticipated second season of The Last of Us—based on Naughty Dog's hugely popular video game franchise—during CES in January. We now have a full trailer, unveiled at SXSW after the footage leaked over the weekend, chock-full of Easter eggs for gaming fans of The Last of Us Part II.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

The series takes place in the 20-year aftermath of a deadly outbreak of mutant fungus (Cordyceps) that turns humans into monstrous zombie-like creatures (the Infected, or Clickers). The world has become a series of separate totalitarian quarantine zones and independent settlements, with a thriving black market and a rebel militia known as the Fireflies making life complicated for the survivors. Joel (Pedro Pascal) is a hardened smuggler tasked with escorting the teenage Ellie (Bella Ramsay) across the devastated US, battling hostile forces and hordes of zombies, to a Fireflies unit outside the quarantine zone. Ellie is special: She is immune to the deadly fungus, and the hope is that her immunity holds the key to beating the disease.

S2 is set five years after the events of the first season and finds the bond beginning to fray between plucky survivors Joel and Ellie. That's the inevitable outcome of S1's shocking finale, when they finally arrived at their destination, only to discover the secret to her immunity to the Cordyceps fungus meant Ellie would have to die to find a cure. Ellie was willing to sacrifice herself, but once she was under anesthesia, Joel went berserk and killed all the hospital staff to save her life—and lied to Ellie about it, claiming the staff were killed by raiders.

Gabriel Luna and Rutina Wesley reprise their S1 roles as Joel's younger brother Tommy and his pregnant wife, Maria, respectively. Joining the cast this year are Kaitlyn Dever as a vengeance-seeking soldier named Abby; Young Mazino as Jesse; Isabela Merced as Dina, Jesse's ex and a romantic interest for Ellie; Danny Ramirez as a loyal soldier named Manny; Ariela Barer as a doctor named Mel; Tati Gabrielle as a military medic named Nora; Spencer Lord as Owen; and Jeffrey Wright as Isaac, who leads a militia (Wright played the same role in the video game). Catherine O'Hara will also appear as Joel's therapist, Gail.

Even if you're not familiar with the games, there's plenty to like in this evocative trailer, which teases a wintry showdown between human survivors and a horde of Cordyceps-infested zombies—including taking out a zombie by immolating it with a flame thrower. Alas, the odds are against team human, with at least one newly infected person declaring, "You're gonna lose." And yes, Ellie learns the truth about what Joel did and is suitably horrified when she confronts him: "You swore." We're looking forward to what promises to be a stellar new installment in the TV saga.

The second season of The Last of Us premieres on April 13, 2025, on HBO and Max.

Read full article

Comments