An astrophotograph of the interstellar comet known as 3I/ATLAS highlights its green coma and a wandering blue-tinted ion tail. (Copyright Victor Sabet and Julien De Winter, republished with permssion)
Is an interstellar spacecraft zooming through our solar system? That’s the big question for fans of unidentified flying objects — and for a researcher at the University of Washington who analyzed the speculation over the interstellar comet known as 3I/ATLAS.
Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar at the UW Center for an Informed Public, focused on 3I/ATLAS to track how social-media influencers use over-the-top speculation to fill in information gaps.
“I’ve written previously on how expert opinions can fuel conspiracy theorizing through elite-driven rumoring and amplification,” Bayar explained in an email to GeekWire. “My academic interest in philosophy, epistemology and the politics of conspiracy theories, plus a personal interest in space-related conspiracy theories, led me to look more closely at 3I/ATLAS.”
In ancient Greece, those higher powers might have been the gods on Mount Olympus. Bayar argues that a similar process exists today: “Where natural explanations feel incomplete, we substitute a different higher agency, not Zeus this time, but extraterrestrials,” he writes.
Such questions came into the spotlight when 3I/ATLAS was spotted in July. The object’s trajectory suggested that it was only the third known celestial interloper coming into the solar system from far beyond. Even after astronomers built up evidence to classify it as a comet, 3I/ATLAS exhibited enough anomalous behavior to sustain speculation about alien technology.
Exactly how was that speculation sustained? A key figure is Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. Years before 3I/ATLAS was found, Loeb and a colleague raised the possibility that a previously sighted interstellar object known as ‘Oumuamua “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.”
Loeb hit upon the alien-technology theme repeatedly in follow-up research papers and a book published in 2023. This year’s discovery of 3I/ATLAS gave a fresh boost to his speculative musings. To track how such musings influenced online discussions about 3I/ATLAS, Bayar used a media analytics platform called Brandwatch to analyze roughly 700,000 posts about the comet that were published on the X social-media channel between July 1 and Nov. 21.
“Almost 280,000 of the 700,000 posts invoke aliens or ET technology — about 40% of the 3I/ATLAS conversation on X,” Bayar writes. About 130,000 posts reference Loeb by name or by his status as a Harvard scientist. More than 82,000 posts explicitly pair his name with the alien-technology hypothesis.
“To be fair, at times, Avi Loeb states that 3I/ATLAS is most likely a natural interstellar comet,” Bayar says. “But he then spends far more time walking through its supposed ‘anomalies’ and entertaining the alien-technology hypothesis. For most audiences, the volume and emphasis of that speculation effectively buries the initial caveat and recenters the story around the alien frame rather than the natural-comet explanation.”
All that feeds into a broader online ecosystem that Bayar calls the “mystery economy.”
“Our information systems reward the production of mystery and speculation,” he writes. “That reward is amplified by a ready-made ecosystem of websites, content creators across platforms who produce, spread and amplify speculative takes. Those creators need a steady supply of ‘new’ material, and Loeb’s ever-growing list of anomalies, even when indirectly refuted by organizations like NASA, feeds that need for sustained mystery and endlessly recyclable content.”
In case you’re curious about the anomalies, Penn State astronomer Jason Wright, who focuses on studies of extrasolar planets and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, ticks through Loeb’s list (and offers explanations that don’t involve aliens) in a blog post that was published last month.
But the point behind Bayar’s research has more to do with social-media dynamics than with planetary science. The insights gained from studying the “Alien of the Gaps” could well be applied to other spheres of conspiratorial theorizing, ranging from vaccine denialism to the search for a Jan. 6 pipe-bomb suspect.
Bayar had to limit his statistical analysis to posts about 3I/ATLAS on X, but he saw signs that information was flowing between different online platforms. “One of the most frequently appearing terms in the 3I/ATLAS conversation on X is ‘@YouTube,’ suggesting that many X accounts are reacting to or sharing YouTube videos,” he told GeekWire.
“Because of data-access constraints, we can’t confidently identify a single ‘nexus’ of spread,” Bayar said. “What we can say is that the conversation on X is both widely distributed and largely contained within alien-adjacent communities: Total volume is still under a million posts, which suggests it hasn’t broken out into a truly mass-viral story beyond the UFO/UAP crowd.”
[Michael Lynch] recently decided to delve into the world of off-grid, decentralized communications with MeshCore, because being able to communicate wirelessly with others in a way that does not depend on traditional communication infrastructure is pretty compelling. After getting his hands on a variety of hardware and trying things out, he wrote up his thoughts from the perspective of a hardware-curious software developer.
He ends up testing a variety of things: MeshCore firmware installed on a Heltec V3 board (used via an app over Bluetooth), a similar standalone device with antenna and battery built in (SenseCAP T-1000e, left in the header image), and a Lilygo T-Deck+ (right in the header image above). These all use MeshCore, which is built on and reportedly compatible with Meshtastic, a framework we have featured in the past.
The cheapest way to get started is with a board like the Heltec v3, pictured here. It handles the LoRa wireless communications part, and one interfaces to it over Bluetooth.
The first two devices are essentially MeshCore gateways, to which the user connects over Bluetooth. The T-Deck is a standalone device that resembles a Blackberry, complete with screen and keypad. [Michael] dove into what it was like to get them up and running.
Probably his most significant takeaway was that the whole process of onboarding seemed a lot more difficult and much less clear than it could be. This is an experience many of us can relate to: the fragmented documentation that exists seems written both by and for people who are already intimately familiar with the project in its entirety.
Another thing he learned was that while LoRa is a fantastic technology capable of communicating wirelessly over great distances with low power, those results require good antennas and line of sight. In a typical urban-ish environment, range is going to be much more limited. [Michael] was able to get a maximum range of about five blocks between two devices. Range could be improved by purchasing and installing repeaters or by having more devices online and in range of one another, but that’s where [Michael] drew the line. He felt he had gotten a pretty good idea of the state of things by then, and not being a radio expert, he declined to purchase repeater hardware without any real sense of where he should put them, or what performance gains he could expect by doing so.
Probably the most surprising discovery was that MeshCore is not entirely open source, which seems odd for an off-grid decentralized communications framework. Some parts are open, but the official clients (the mobile apps, web app, and T-Deck firmware) are not. [Michael] found this out when, being primarily a software developer, he took a look at the code to see if there was anything he could do to improve the poor user experience on the T-Deck and found that the firmware was proprietary.
[Michael]’s big takeaway as a hardware-curious software developer is that the concept is great and accessible (hardware is not expensive and there is no licensing requirement for LoRa), but it’s not really there yet in terms of whether it’s practical for someone to buy a few to distribute among friends for use in an emergency. Not without getting into setting up enough repeaters to ensure connectivity, anyway.
A feature that we’ve taken for granted since 2020 – the ability to shoot Portrait Mode photos using Night Mode – has quietly vanished from the latest Pro models. Users started noticing something was wrong and flagged it on Reddit and Apple’s forums. Now, Apple has officially confirmed via a support document that Night Mode […]
In need of a little fall pick-me-up? Give your PC a little productivity boost with this Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows lifetime license. This suite of eight helpful apps can give your device a total refresh, and right now it’s only $34.97 (reg. $219.99) — making the apps cost less than $5 each.
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"First the penny. Next, paper checks?" asks CNN:
When the U.S. Mint stopped making pennies last month for the first time in 238 years, it drew a lot of attention. But there have been quiet moves to stop using paper checks as well. The government stopped sending out most paper checks to recipients as of the end of September, part of an effort to fully modernize federal benefits payments. And on Thursday the Federal Reserve put out a notice that suggested it is considering — but only considering — the "winding down" of checking services it now provides for banks.
The central bank's statement said that as an alternative to winding down those services, it is mulling more investment in its check processing services, but noted that would come at a higher cost. But it is also considering not making any such investments, in order to keep costs roughly unchanged. That would lead to reduced reliability of those services going forward. "Over time, check use has steadily declined, digital payment methods have grown in availability and use, and check fraud has risen," said the notice from the Fed. "Also, the Reserve Banks will need to make substantial investments in their check infrastructure to continue providing the same level of check services going forward."
A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta in June found that as of last year, more than 90% of surveyed consumers said they prefer to use something other than a check for paying bills, and just 6% paid by check. That's a sharp drop from the 18% of bills paid by checks as recently as 2017. Consumers also reported they view checks as second-worst for convenience and speed of payment, ahead of only money orders. And they're ranked as the least secure form of any payment other than cash.
But even if it's true that options such as direct deposit, automatic bill paying and electronic payment systems such as Venmo, PayPal and Zelle have all reduced the need for traditional checks, paper checks are still an important part of the payment system. They make up about 5% of transactions and represent 21% of the value of all those payments, according to a statement from Michelle Bowman, the Fed's vice chair for supervision, who dissented from the Fed's Thursday statement.
Bloomberg reports that Google "must renegotiate any contract to make its search engine or artificial intelligence app the default for smartphones and other devices every year, a federal judge ruled."
Judge Amit Mehta in Washington sided with the US Justice Department on the one year limitation in his final ruling on what changes the search giant must make in the wake of a landmark ruling that the company illegally monopolized online search. The yearly renegotiation will give rivals — particularly those in the burgeoning generative AI field — a chance to compete for key placements.
The final judgment will still allow Google to offer its products to Apple Inc. for use in its popular iPhone and pay other electronics makers like Samsung Electronics Co. for default placement. But the judge said those contracts must be renegotiated annually. Mehta noted in his ruling that both Google and the US government said they could work with the one-year limitation on default contracts. As such, "the court holds that a hard-and-fast termination requirement after one year would best carry out the purpose of the injunctive relief."
Amazon will release its updated Kindle Scribe lineup next week, offering better performance, color capabilities, AI features, and cloud tools designed for reading, writing, and productivity.
aMeta lready sells VR headsets and Ray-Ban smart glasses, but these new glasses sound a bit different. Their format factor would reportedly be similar to the Apple Vision Pro, with a puck-like power source.
It’s called RTL-HAOS, and it’s intended to act as a bridge. Whatever you can pick up using the RTL_433 tool, you can set up with Home Assistant using RTL-HAOS. If you’re unfamiliar with RTL_433, it’s a multitalented data receiver for picking up all sorts of stuff on a range of bands using RTL-SDR receivers, as well as a range of other hardware. While it’s most closely associated with products that communicate in the 433 MHz band, it can also work with products that talk in 868 MHz, 315 MHz, 345 MHz, and 915 MHz, assuming your hardware supports it. Out of the box, it’s capable of working with everything from keyless entry systems to thermostats, weather stations, and energy monitors. You can even use it to listen to the tire pressure monitors in your Fiat Abarth 124 Spider, if you’re so inclined.
[Jaron’s] tool integrates these devices nicely into Home Assistant, where they’ll appear automatically thanks to MQTT discovery. It also offers nice signal metrics like RSSI and SNR, so you can determine whether a given link is stable. You can even use multiple RTL-SDR dongles if you’re so inclined. If you’re eager to pull some existing environmental sensors into your smart home, this may prove a very easy way to do it.
The cool thing about Home Assistant is that hackers are always working to integrate more gear into the ecosystem. Oftentimes, they’re far faster and more efficient at doing this than big-name corporations. Meanwhile, if you’re working on your own hacks for this popular smart home platform, we’d probably like to know about it. Be sure to hit up the tips line in due time.
Apple’s first foldable iPhone has reportedly entered final testing, with a crease-free display and a planned 2025 launch, signaling a major shift in the foldable smartphone market.
Chromebooks have a good reputation for being low-maintenance computers with solid security and privacy. By and large, this is true. It's why we trust them for use by children and college students, or why some companies like to issue them to employees who only need a basic computer.
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