Four years after offering special placement in a "top stories carousel" in search results to entice publishers to use a format it created for mobile pages, called AMP, Google announced last week that it will end that preferential treatment in the spring. "We will prioritize pages with great page experience, whether implemented using AMP or any other web technology, as we rank the results," Google said in a blog post. From a report: The company had indicated in 2018 that it would drop the preference eventually. Last week's announcement of a concrete timeline comes less than a month after the Department of Justice called Google a "monopoly gatekeeper to the internet" in a lawsuit alleging antitrust violations and as pressure mounts on officials in the European Union, which has already fined Google more than $9 billion for antitrust violations. "I did always think AMP posed antitrust concerns," said Sally Hubbard, author of the book "Monopolies Suck" and an antitrust expert with the Open Markets Institute. "It's, 'If you want to show up on the top of the search results, you have to play by our rules, you have to use AMP.'" Google spokesperson Meghann Farnsworth did not address the timing of the change but said AMP is not dead, saying the company is "fully committed to AMP as a technology." She said AMP continues to be required for certain features that "are not technically possible" without it, such as "swipe to visit" in Google Images, and that it's "preferred" in the "for you" feed in Google's news reading app, Google Discover.

Mozilla has opened today a public comment and consultation period about the ways it could enable support for the controversial privacy-centric DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) protocol inside Firefox. From a report: The browser maker's decision to open a rare public consultation period comes after the organization faced criticism last year in the UK for its plans to support DoH inside Firefox. UK government officials, law enforcement agencies, and local internet service providers criticized Mozilla for developing and wanting to roll out DoH, a feature they said could have helped suspects bypass enterprise firewalls and parental controls blocklists -- even earning the browser maker a nomination for an "Internet Villain" award from a local ISP. All last year's hoopla was caused by DoH, a web protocol developed as an alternative to the classic DNS (Domain Name System). DoH works by encrypting DNS queries (which are normally sent out in clear text) and hiding them inside normal-looking HTTPS web traffic.

After two long, complicated years, every Android user worldwide (outside China) now has access to the next-gen texting standard that is replacing SMS. Google is directly offering RCS chat services through its Android Messages app to anybody who installs it and uses it as their default texting app, which partly bypasses a carrier rollout that, at times, has ranged from sluggish to incoherent to broken. From a report Just as importantly, Google has announced that it's finally beginning to enable a key privacy feature: end-to-end encryption. For Android users who use Android Messages, one-on-one chats will eventually be end-to-end encrypted by default, meaning neither carriers nor Google will be able to read the content of those messages. Even though encryption is only beginning to roll out to people who sign up for the public beta for Android Messages, turning on encryption for RCS is a very big deal. It's a massive privacy win, as it could mean that the de facto replacement for SMS will, by default, be private on the smartphone platform used by the vast majority of people worldwide.

As for the people who use that other smartphone platform -- the iPhone -- we have no word on whether Apple intends to adopt the RCS standard. But as every carrier worldwide gets on board, and now that there is a clearer path to ensuring private communication with RCS, the pressure on Apple to participate is likely to build. Unfortunately, SMS becoming fully deprecated and replaced by RCS will only happen if all goes to plan for Google. Since initially announcing plans to transition to RCS as the primary texting platform for Android, the standard's rollout has been mired in confusion. In attempting to be neutral and make Android's texting a standard shared by carriers worldwide, Google set itself up with the job of herding multibillion-dollar cats -- with sadly predictable results.

Researchers from the University of Michigan used their own automated censorship tracking system to collect more than 21 billion measurements over 20 months in 221 countries. They discovered that citizens in what are considered the world's freest countries aren't safe from internet censorship. From a press release: [Roya Ensafi, U-M assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science who led the development of the tool, and her team] found that censorship is increasing in 103 of the countries studied, including unexpected places like Norway, Japan, Italy, India, Israel and Poland. These countries, the team notes, are rated some of the world's freest by Freedom House, a nonprofit that advocates for democracy and human rights. They were among nine countries where Censored Planet found significant, previously undetected censorship events between August 2018 and April 2020. They also found previously undetected events in Cameroon, Ecuador and Sudan. While the United States saw a small uptick in blocking, mostly driven by individual companies or internet service providers filtering content, the study did not uncover widespread censorship. However, Ensafi points out that the groundwork for that has been put in place here.

"When the United States repealed net neutrality, they created an environment in which it would be easy, from a technical standpoint, for ISPs to interfere with or block internet traffic," she said. "The architecture for greater censorship is already in place and we should all be concerned about heading down a slippery slope." It's already happening abroad, the researchers found. "What we see from our study is that no country is completely free," said Ram Sundara Raman, U-M doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering and first author of the study. "We're seeing that many countries start with legislation that compels ISPs to block something that's obviously bad like child pornography or pirated content. But once that blocking infrastructure is in place, governments can block any websites they choose, and it's a very opaque process. That's why censorship measurement is crucial, particularly continuous measurements that show trends over time." The study is titled "Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observatory."

According to Chrome product manager Mark Chang, Google's version of Chrome that support ARM Macs is now available to download. The Verge reports: In theory, a native version of the notoriously resource-hungry browser might run more efficiently on Apple's Arm-based computers. In our reviews of the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini equipped with the new M1 chip, though, we found that the version of Chrome built for Intel chips already runs well on Apple's new Macs, so hopefully this native version runs even better. You'll be able to pick which version of Chrome to download from the browser's website.

Google began rolling out a new version of Chrome on Tuesday, touting the "the largest gain in Chrome performance in years" thanks to some under-the-hood changes. The company's blog about the new release didn't mention anything about a version optimized for Apple's Arm-based Macs.

In an open letter published Wednesday, a group of Facebook moderators say the company is putting them and their families at risk by asking them to go back to work in the midst of the pandemic. Engadget reports: The content reviewers say that while workers with a doctor's note can be excused from going to the office, those with high risk family members don't get the same opportunity. "In several offices, multiple COVID cases have occurred on the floor," the letter, states. "Workers have asked Facebook leadership, and the leadership of your outsourcing firms like Accenture and CPL, to take urgent steps to protect us and value our work. You refused. We are publishing this letter because we are left with no choice."

According to the letter-writers, the reason Facebook is pushing moderators to go back to the office is because the company's AI-based moderation is "years away" from being truly effective: "Without informing the public, Facebook undertook a massive live experiment in heavily automated content moderation. Management told moderators that we should no longer see certain varieties of toxic content coming up in the review tool from which we work -- such as graphic violence or child abuse, for example. The AI wasn't up to the job. Important speech got swept into the maw of the Facebook filter -- and risky content, like self-harm, stayed up. The lesson is clear. Facebook's algorithms are years away from achieving the necessary level of sophistication to moderate content automatically."

The letter also brings up several issues that predate the coronavirus pandemic, like the lack of mental healthcare for moderators as well as their status as contractors rather than full-time employees. Among the moderators demand from Facebook and the contracted companies that employ them: hazard pay, more flexibility to work from home and access to better mental healthcare. "We appreciate the valuable work content reviewers do and we prioritize their health and safety," a Facebook spokesperson said. "While we believe in having an open internal dialogue, these discussions need to be honest. The majority of these 15,000 global content reviewers have been working from home and will continue to do so for the duration of the pandemic. All of them have access to health care and confidential wellbeing resources from their first day of employment, and Facebook has exceeded health guidance on keeping facilities safe for any in-office work."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Cerebras Systems and the federal Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory today announced that the company's CS-1 system is more than 10,000 times faster than a graphics processing unit (GPU). On a practical level, this means AI neural networks that previously took months to train can now train in minutes on the Cerebras system.

Cerebras makes the world's largest computer chip, the WSE. Chipmakers normally slice a wafer from a 12-inch-diameter ingot of silicon to process in a chip factory. Once processed, the wafer is sliced into hundreds of separate chips that can be used in electronic hardware. But Cerebras, started by SeaMicro founder Andrew Feldman, takes that wafer and makes a single, massive chip out of it. Each piece of the chip, dubbed a core, is interconnected in a sophisticated way to other cores. The interconnections are designed to keep all the cores functioning at high speeds so the transistors can work together as one. [...] A single Cerebras CS-1 is 26 inches tall, fits in one-third of a rack, and is powered by the industry's only wafer-scale processing engine, Cerebras' WSE. It combines memory performance with massive bandwidth, low latency interprocessor communication, and an architecture optimized for high bandwidth computing.

Cerebras's CS-1 system uses the WSE wafer-size chip, which has 1.2 trillion transistors, the basic on-off electronic switches that are the building blocks of silicon chips. Intel's first 4004 processor in 1971 had 2,300 transistors, and the Nvidia A100 80GB chip, announced yesterday, has 54 billion transistors. Feldman said in an interview with VentureBeat that the CS-1 was also 200 times faster than the Joule Supercomputer, which is No. 82 on a list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. [...] In this demo, the Joule Supercomputer used 16,384 cores, and the Cerebras computer was 200 times faster, according to energy lab director Brian Anderson. Cerebras costs several million dollars and uses 20 kilowatts of power.

After analyzing 275,699,516 passwords leaked during 2020 data breaches, NordPass and partners found that the most common passwords are incredibly easy to guess -- and it could take less than a second or two for attackers to break into accounts using these credentials. Only 44% of those recorded were considered "unique." ZDNet reports: On Wednesday, the password manager solutions provider published its annual report on the state of password security, finding that the most popular options were "123456," "123456789," "picture1," "password," and "12345678." With the exception of "picture1," which would take approximately three hours to decipher using a brute-force attack, each password would take seconds using either dictionary scripts -- which compile common phrases and numerical combinations to try -- or simple, human guesswork.

As one of the entrants on the 200-strong list describes the state of affairs when it comes to password security, "whatever," it seems many of us are still reluctant to use strong, difficult-to-crack passwords -- and instead, we are going for options including "football," "iloveyou," "letmein," and "pokemon." When selecting a password, you should avoid patterns or repetitions, such as letters or numbers that are next to each other on a keyboard. Adding a capital letter, symbols, and numbers in unexpected places can help, too -- and in all cases, you should not use personal information as a password, such as birthdates or names.

MojoKid writes: AMD officially launched its Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics cards today, previously known in the PC gaming community as Big Navi. The company claimed these high-end GPUs would compete with NVIDIA's best GeForce RTX 30 series and it appears AMD made good on its claims. AMD's new Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon 6800 are based on the company's RDNA 2 GPU architecture, with the former sporting 72 Compute Units (CUs) and 2250MHz boost clock, while the RX 6800 sports 60 CUs at a 2105MHz boost clock. Both cards come equipped with 16GB of GDDR6 memory and 128MB of on-die cache AMD calls Infinity Cache, that improves bandwidth and latency, feeding the GPU in front of its 256-bit GDDR6 memory interface.

In the benchmarks, it is fair to say the Radeon RX 6800 is typically faster than an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 just as AMD suggested. Things are not as cut and dry for the Radeon RX 6800 XT though, as the GeForce RTX 3080 and Radeon RX 6800 XT trade victories depending on the game title or workload, but the RTX 3080 has an edge overall. In DXR Ray Tracing performance, NVIDIA has a distinct advantage at the high-end. Though the Radeon RX 6800 wasn't too far behind and RTX 3070, neither the Radeon RX 6800 XT or 6800 card came close the GeForce RTX 3080. Pricing is set at $649 and $579 for the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6800, respectively and the cards are on sale as of today. However, demand is likely to be fierce as this new crop of high-end graphics cards from both companies have been quickly evaporating from retail shelves.

Google said today it plans to add a new section on the Chrome Web Store where extension developers will disclose what user data they're collecting from users and what they plan to do with the information. From a report: The new section is set to go into effect on January 18, 2021, and will appear as a "Privacy practices" button on each extension's Web Store listing. To aid the process, Google has added a new section today in the Web Store dashboard where extension developers will be able to disclose what data they collect from their users and for what purposes.

Google is launching a major redesign of its Google Pay app on both Android and iOS today. From a report: Like similar phone-based contactless payment services, Google Pay -- or Android Pay as it was known then -- started out as a basic replacement for your credit card. Over time, the company added a few more features on top of that but the overall focus never really changed. After about five years in the market, Google Pay now has about 150 million users in 30 countries. With today's update and redesign, Google is keeping all the core features intact but also taking the service in a new direction with a strong emphasis on helping you manage your personal finances (and maybe get a deal here and there as well). Google is also partnering with 11 banks to launch a new kind of bank account in 2021. Called Plex, these mobile-first bank accounts will have no monthly fees, overdraft charges or minimum balances. The banks will own the accounts but the Google Pay app will be the main conduit for managing these accounts. The launch partners for this are Citi and Stanford Federal Credit Union.

"What we're doing in this new Google Pay app, think of it is combining three things into one," Google director of product management Josh Woodward said as he walked me through a demo of the new app. "The three things are three tabs in the app. One is the ability to pay friends and businesses really fast. The second is to explore offers and rewards, so you can save money at shops. And the third is getting insights about your spending so you can stay on top of your money." Paying friends and businesses was obviously always at the core of Google Pay -- but the emphasis here has shifted a bit. "You'll notice that everything in the product is built around your relationships," Caesar Sengupta, Google's lead for Payments and Next Billion Users, told me. "It's not about long lists of transactions or weird numbers. All your engagements pivot around people, groups, and businesses."

Hmmmmmm shares a report: U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief Steve Dickson is "100% confident" in the safety of the Boeing 737 MAX but says the airplane maker has more to do as it works to improve its safety culture. Dickson on Wednesday signed an order to allow the best-selling plane to resume flights after it was grounded worldwide in March 2019 following two crashes that killed 346 people and led to Boeing's biggest crisis in decades. The order will end the longest grounding in commercial aviation history and paves the way for Boeing to resume U.S. deliveries and commercial flights by the end of the year. "We've done everything humanly possible to make sure" these types of crashes do not happen again," FAA Administrator Dickson told Reuters in a 30-minute telephone interview, adding the design changes "have eliminated what caused these particular accidents." The FAA is requiring new training to deal with a key safety system called MCAS that is faulted for the two fatal crashes as well as significant new safeguards and other software changes. "I feel 100% confident," said Dickson, a former airline and military pilot, who took over as FAA administration in August 2019 and took the controls for a 737 MAX test flight in September. In a video message released on Wednesday, he said that the 20-month review was "long and grueling, but we said from the start that we would take the time necessary to get this right." Dickson said he emphasized to Boeing the importance of safety. "I understand they have a business to run but they don't have anything if they don't have a safe product," Dickson said. Dickson suggested Boeing has more to do to improve safety.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Is one of Tesla's infotainment systems defective by design? That's a question the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration hopes to answer. It has started an engineering analysis after hundreds of customer complaints of bricked systems resulted in a preliminary investigation in June. NHTSA thinks it knows what the problem is: an 8GB eMMC NAND flash memory chip with a finite number of write cycles, fitted to its Media Control Unit. The MCU regularly writes logs to this chip and, within three or four years, reaches the lifetime number of cycles. At this point the touchscreen dies, taking with it functions like the car's backup camera, the ability to defog the windows, and also the audible alerts and chimes for the driver aids and turn signals.

After the regulator's Office of Defects Investigation received 537 complaints, it asked Tesla if it knew of any more problems with the Nvidia Tegra 3-based system, which is fitted to approximately 158,000 Models S (2012-2018) and X (2016-2018). Tesla did, handing over 2,399 complaints and field reports, 7,777 warranty claims, and 4,746 non-warranty claims. The finite -- and short -- lifespan of these infotainment systems is a relatively well-known problem within the Tesla community. "The automaker told NHTSA that as of firmware 2020.20, each block of NAND flash should only receive 0.7 read/write cycles a day, which would therefore take between 11 and 12 years before the chip reached its end of life," the report adds. "However, owners who use their cars more often could see this time before failure halved."

"However, Tesla also told NHTSA that 'the MCU failures are likely to continue to occur in subject vehicles as vehicles continue to operate and use available memory in the 8GB eMMC NAND flash memory until 100 percent of units have failed.'" Ars says an official recall may occur in the coming months.

A group of astronomers from The University of Texas at Austin has revived an idea shelved by NASA to build a lunar liquid-mirror telescope on the moon to study the first stars in the universe. "The team, led by NASA Hubble Fellow Anna Schauer, will publish their results in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal," reports Phys.Org. From the report: These first stars formed about 13 billion years ago. They are unique, born out of a mix of hydrogen and helium gasses, and likely tens or 100 times larger than the Sun. New calculations by Schauer show that a previously proposed facility, a liquid mirror telescope that would operate from the surface of the Moon, could study these stars. Proposed in 2008 by a team led by Roger Angel of The University of Arizona, this facility was called the Lunar Liquid-Mirror Telescope (LLMT). NASA had done an analysis on this proposed facility a decade ago, but decided not to pursue the project. According to Niv Drory, a senior research scientist with UT Austin's McDonald Observatory, the supporting science on the earliest stars did not exist at that point. "This telescope is perfect for that problem," he said.

The proposed lunar liquid-mirror telescope, which Schauer has nicknamed the "Ultimately Large Telescope," would have a mirror 100 meters in diameter. It would operate autonomously from the lunar surface, receiving power from a solar power collection station on the Moon, and relaying data to satellite in lunar orbit. Rather than coated glass, the telescope's mirror would be made of liquid, as it's lighter, and thus cheaper, to transport to the Moon. The telescope's mirror would be a spinning vat of liquid, topped by a metallic -- and thus reflective -- liquid. (Previous liquid mirror telescopes have used mercury.) The vat would spin continuously, to keep the surface of the liquid in the correct paraboloid shape to work as a mirror. The telescope would be stationary, situated inside a crater at the Moon's north or south pole. To study the first stars, it would stare at the same patch of sky continuously, to collect as much light from them as possible. The team is proposing that the astronomical community revisit the shelved plan for a lunar liquid-mirror telescope, as a way to study these first stars in the universe.

Twitter said on Tuesday it was globally launching tweets that disappear after 24 hours, similar to the stories feature that is popular on Snapchat and Facebook's photo-sharing app Instagram. Reuters reports: Twitter has previously announced its plan for these ephemeral tweets, dubbed "fleets," and tested the feature in Brazil, Italy, India, and South Korea. "Some of you tell us that Tweeting is uncomfortable because it feels so public, so permanent, and like there's so much pressure to rack up Retweets and Likes," design director Joshua Harris and product manager Sam Haveson said in a blog post. "Because they disappear from view after a day, Fleets helped people feel more comfortable sharing personal and casual thoughts, opinions, and feelings," they added.

Fleets, which include text, photos and videos, will be available at the top of users' home timelines on Twitter and on the sender's profile. Twitter also confirmed it was working on a live audio feature, dubbed 'Spaces,' that it aims to test later this year. The feature will allow users to talk in public, group conversations. It has similarities with Clubhouse, a social platform in which users are invited to talk in voice chat rooms. "Given all of the potential for abuse within audio spaces, we are going to be making it available first to women and historically marginalized communities," said Twitter's Kelley.

Two of China's top companies have joined forces to design, develop, and build an electric car for the express purpose of ride-hailing. The Verge reports: The vehicle is an adorable green hatchback called the D1, and it was developed by Didi Chuxing, the top ride-hailing company in China that notoriously defeated Uber in 2016, and BYD, one of the leading electric vehicle manufacturers. The D1 will have a range of 418 km (260 miles) as judged by NEDC (New European Driving Cycle). They also explained some of the more interesting design touches that make this vehicle particularly well-suited for app-based ride-hailing.

There is a medium-sized screen on the dashboard as well as two more touchscreens on the back of both headrests for passengers to access navigation and other information. There is one more smaller screen behind the steering wheel that serves as an instrument cluster. The car comes with sliding doors to prevent riders from accidentally hitting passengers or cyclists. The driver's seat is extra comfy for extended use, and there's added legroom in the back seat. The paint job is described as "avocado green," which is similar to Didi's shared bikes.

The D1 will come with a Level 2 driver assistance system that includes lane-departure warning, automatic braking, and pedestrian collision warning. There will also be a driver monitoring system to ensure that drivers keep their hands on the wheel and stay focused on the road. Didi says it used data gathered from its 550 million registered passengers and 31 million drivers to design the D1.

Reviews are starting to pour in of Apple's MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Mini featuring the new M1 ARM-based processor -- and they're overwhelmingly positive. "As with the Air, the Pro's performance exceeds expectations," writes Nilay Patel via The Verge.

"Apple's next chapter offers strong performance gains, great battery and starts at $999," says Brian Heater via TechCrunch.

"When Apple said it would start producing Macs with its own system-on-chip processors, custom CPU and GPU silicon (and a bunch of other stuff) to replace parts from Intel and AMD, we figured it would be good. I never expected it would be this good," says Jason Cross in his review of the MacBook Air M1.

"The M1 is a serious, serious contender for one of the all-time most efficient and highest-performing architectures we've ever seen deploy," says ExtremeTech's Joel Hruska.

"Spending a few days with the 2020 Mac mini has shown me that it's a barnburner of a miniature desktop PC," writes Chris Welch via The Verge. "It outperforms most Intel Macs in several benchmarks, runs apps reliably, and offers a fantastic day-to-day experience whether you're using it for web browsing and email or for creative editing and professional work. That potential will only grow when Apple inevitably raises the RAM ceiling and (hopefully) brings back those missing USB ports..."

"Quibbling about massively parallel workloads -- which the M1 wasn't designed for -- aside, Apple has clearly broken the ice on high-performance ARM desktop and laptop designs," writes Jim Salter via Ars Technica. "Yes, you can build an ARM system that competes strongly with x86, even at very high performance levels."

"The M1-equipped MacBook Air now packs far better performance than its predecessors, rivaling at times the M1-based MacBook Pro. At $999, it's the best value among macOS laptops," concludes PCMag.

"For developers, the Apple Silicon Macs also represent the very first full-fledged Arm machines on the market that have few-to-no compromises. This is a massive boost not just for Apple, but for the larger Arm ecosystem and the growing Arm cloud-computing business," writes Andrei Frumusanu via AnandTech. "Overall, Apple hit it out of the park with the M1."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google was sued last week for allegedly stealing Android users' cellular data allowances through unapproved, undisclosed transmissions to the web giant's servers. The lawsuit, Taylor et al v. Google, was filed in a US federal district court in San Jose on behalf of four plaintiffs based in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin in the hope the case will be certified by a judge as a class action. The complaint contends that Google is using Android users' limited cellular data allowances without permission to transmit information about those individuals that's unrelated to their use of Google services. Data sent over Wi-Fi is not at issue, nor is data sent over a cellular connection in the absence of Wi-Fi when an Android user has chosen to use a network-connected application. What concerns the plaintiffs is data sent to Google's servers that isn't the result of deliberate interaction with a mobile device -- we're talking passive or background data transfers via cell network, here. "Google designed and implemented its Android operating system and apps to extract and transmit large volumes of information between Plaintiffs' cellular devices and Google using Plaintiffs' cellular data allowances," the complaint claims. "Google's misappropriation of Plaintiffs' cellular data allowances through passive transfers occurs in the background, does not result from Plaintiffs' direct engagement with Google's apps and properties on their devices, and happens without Plaintiffs' consent." The allegation: "The device, stationary, with all apps closed, transferred data to Google about 16 times an hour, or about 389 times in 24 hours. Assuming even half of that data is outgoing, Google would receive about 4.4MB per day or 130MB per month in this manner per device subject to the same test conditions."

Mozilla today launched Firefox 83 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. An anonymous reader shares a report: Firefox 83's highlight feature is HTTPS-Only Mode, in which the browser attempts to establish fully secure connections to every website (just like the EFF's HTTPS Everywhere). If it can't, Firefox asks for your permission before connecting to a website that doesn't support secure connections. To enable HTTPS-Only Mode, click on Firefox's menu button, hit Preferences, then Privacy & Security, scroll down to HTTPS-Only Mode, and choose "Enable HTTPS-Only Mode in all windows." [...] Firefox 83 also brings performance improvements (improved page load performance by up to 15%, page responsiveness by up to 12%, and reduced memory usage by up to 8%). Firefox 83 is also the penultimate version of the web browser that will run Flash software; Firefox 85 will completely disable it when it arrives on Jan. 12, 2021.

The giant, aging cables that support one of the world's largest single-dish radio telescopes are slowly unraveling in this U.S. territory, pushing an observatory renowned for its key role in astronomical discoveries to the brink of collapse. The Associated Press reports: The Arecibo Observatory, which is tethered above a sinkhole in Puerto Rico's lush mountain region, boasts a 1,000-foot-wide (305-meter-wide) dish featured in the Jodie Foster film "Contact" and the James Bond movie "GoldenEye." The dish and a dome suspended above it have been used to track asteroids headed toward Earth, conduct research that led to a Nobel Prize and helped scientists trying to determine if a planet is habitable. Last week, one of the telescope's main steel cables that was capable of sustaining 1.2 million pounds (544,000 kilograms) snapped under only 624,000 pounds (283,000 kilograms). That failure further mangled the reflector dish after an auxiliary cable broke in August, tearing a 100-foot hole and damaging the dome above it.

Officials said they were surprised because they had evaluated the structure in August and believed it could handle the shift in weight based on previous inspections. It's a blow for the telescope that more than 250 scientists around the world were using. The facility is also one of Puerto Rico's main tourist attractions, drawing some 90,000 visitors a year. Research has been suspended since August, including a project aiding scientists in their search for nearby galaxies. Some new cables are scheduled to arrive next month, but officials said funding for repairs has not been worked out with federal agencies. Scientists warn that time is running out. Only a handful of cables now support the 900-ton platform. The observatory estimates the damage at more than $12 million and is seeking money from the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency that owns the observatory. The report notes that the observatory is considered crucial for the study of pulsars, which are the remains of stars that can be used to detect gravitational waves. It's also used to search for natural hydrogen, which can reveal how certain cosmic structures are formed.