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In late August, Bloomberg reported rumors that electric automaker Tesla plans to reveal its forthcoming autonomous robotaxi — expected to be called the Cybercab — on Oct. 10 at the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank. This vehicle will reportedly be purpose-built to function solely as a self-driving cab. As such, it will not contain an accelerator, brake pedals, or a steering wheel, and will be hailed via a special Tesla app. A week or so ago, sources shared an image of a small, canary-yellow vehicle trolling the Warners lot, tailed by Tesla production vehicles, leading some to suggest it was a camouflaged robotaxi.

Overstatements, obfuscations, and broken promises regarding the unveiling and production of future Tesla products — a “semi” tractor-trailer, a new sporty roadster, an entry-level vehicle, this robotaxi — are so frequent as to be standard operating procedure. Since Tesla entirely eliminated its public relations department four years ago, The Hollywood Reporter can’t confirm that this event (already postponed once this year) will occur at all.

But, if it does move forward, the global launch of a new Tesla at Warners is certain to raise eyebrows in Hollywood and draw scrutiny toward the chummy relationship between the carmaker’s increasingly controversial CEO, Elon Musk, and Warners’ embattled chief executive, David Zaslav. (Warner Bros. declined to comment on the rumored robotaxi reveal.) As Musk has continued his trajectory into the MAGA-verse — pledging allegiance to right-wing conspiracies, amplifying racist and antisemitic messages, disparaging trans people, including his own daughter, and endorsing Donald Trump — his stock in Hollywood, and that of his brand, has plummeted.

“Elon is very outspoken, and his political views are not as popular in the entertainment industry,” says Debbie Levin, CEO of the Environmental Media Association (EMA), which promotes messages, actions, and products to create positive environmental change in Hollywood.

The brand’s current diminished status in Hollywood is particularly notable when compared to a decade ago, when Tesla products began penetrating the industry. “The Tesla became the ‘It’ car in terms of electrification,” Levin says. “If you could spend $100,000 on a car, that was sort of the way to go to show that you care about the environment.”

As the brand expanded, Southern California — long at the forefront of vehicular trends — became one of its largest markets. “When you’re in Hollywood, driving around the studios, that’s pretty much all you see,” says Ed Kim, president and chief analyst of Auto Pacific, a SoCal-based mobility research firm. “It’s Teslas everywhere.”

Shifts are now occurring in local consumer interest and purchase behavior. “Certainly, we have seen sales drop significantly at Tesla this year,” Kim says, citing a nearly 25 percent drop in sales in the Golden State this quarter alone. This is notable not just because the brand is losing market share as established luxury automakers like Audi, BMW, and Mercedes, and compelling upstarts like Polestar, Lucid, and Rivian, diversify their EV offerings, but because, in an expanding EV marketplace, Tesla is shrinking. “Despite all the headlines, EV sales are still growing. They’re just not growing at the same speed that they were before. But Tesla is actually losing sales,” Kim says. “In fact, Tesla is one of the few EV makers that has been losing volume, not just losing market share.”

This decline can be correlated with Musk’s recent rightward turn and related online antics. “Rejection of Tesla recently spiked and continues among Democrats. They want nothing to do with Tesla,” says Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, a Southern California-based consultancy that conducts hundreds of thousands of in-depth psychographic surveys with new car buyers annually. “And there are no hidden Republicans that are buying these. That just doesn’t exist.”

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“Tesla is one of the few EV makers that has been losing volume, not just losing market share,” says automative analyst Ed Kim. THR Illustration; images: David Livingston/Getty Images, Adobe Stock

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Megan Rumney, an executive with a financial-services firm in Severna Park, Md., an affluent Baltimore suburb, decided to buy her older son a smartphone. She made the purchase with the understanding that she would use it to track his location and social media use. Rumney was hesitant to do so for the fifth grader but admits she felt a lot of social pressure and eventually gave in. All of her friends were getting their children a smartphone, and Rumney didn’t want her son to feel left out; his friends almost exclusively communicate using their devices. Still, she was concerned about the risks of social media and cyberbullying.

At the time, Rumney thought this was a good compromise. It allowed her son, Harrison, now age 14, to ride his bike to school, sporting events, and friend’s houses, giving him some sense of autonomy. A few years later she got her younger son Weston, now age 11, an Apple Watch for much the same reason. At times, though, tracking has become a burden of sorts.

When her kids aren’t with her, she uses apps such as Life360 and her younger son’s Apple Watch to track their location. Rumney says that once you have the technology, it’s hard not to use it all the time. “It’s good to know where they are and be able to get in touch with them, but it’s also a double-edged sword,” she says.

Rumney says she likes knowing where her kids are but doesn’t like her family’s overreliance on devices. She adds that she’s just not sure that being able to track Harrison was worth him having a phone that he spends so much time on, and she doesn’t know how this type of monitoring will affect him emotionally down the line. “If I could do it all again, I’m not sure, I would,” Rumney says. In fact, she’s held off on getting her younger son his own smartphone.

About half of parents in the U.S. say they monitor their adolescents’ movements via location-tracking apps, according to a study published in June 2023 in the Journal of Family Psychology. An additional 14 percent of parents who participated in the study claimed to use a tracking app while their child reported that they weren’t being surveilled, indicating that the monitoring was done unbeknownst to the child.

Experts worry that tracking teens’ locations can turn into a slippery slope that can at times hinder a teen’s relationship with their parents and harm their developing sense of autonomy, as well as create a false sense of security.

With so many things for parents to worry about, from school shooters to fentanyl overdoses and child trafficking, it’s no surprise that they look to location monitoring apps such as Find My iPhone and Life360, which use GPS, as well as the location of nearby Wi-Fi networks and cellular towers, to track and keep their children safe, says Sophia Choukas-Bradley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, whose research focuses on the mental health and well-being of adolescents and emerging adults. “With that said, for adolescents, this is a stage of life when kids are seeking autonomy and independence from their parents,” she says, “and a time when privacy feels really important to kids for good developmental reasons.”

Choukas-Bradley adds that part of teenagers’ normal development has to do with the urge for privacy and the ability to maneuver their first romantic relationships or hold their own with peers while just hanging out. This stage of seeking independence during the teen years remains crucial to them for fostering a sense of personal responsibility, learning to make their own decisions, and establishing their own system of values. “There’s some tricky gray areas with regards to what tracking kids can tell parents and what that does to a kid’s sense of autonomy and privacy,” she says. Research published in the August 2019 issue of the International Journal of Adolescence and Youth found that some children understood their parents’ concerns for their safety, but at the same time, many felt that their parents often went too far by contacting them constantly in ways that felt meddlesome.

When parents’ scrutiny is overly intrusive, teens’ natural tendency is to rebel. “This can lead to feelings of resentment, which may strain the relationship,” says Judy Ho Gavazza, an associate professor of psychology at Pepperdine University.

A study published in November 2020 in the journal Computers in Human Behavior found that perceptions of privacy invasion are associated with rebellious responses. Teens devise ways to evade their parents by turning off their phone, letting their battery go dead, or refusing to respond to text messages. (Friction over tracking happens less with preteens, who need more supervision and expect less privacy.)

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Bart Starr, Jr.

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Since the COVID pandemic began, claims that the disease poses only minimal risk to children have spread widely, on the presumption that the lower rate of severe acute illness in kids tells the whole story. Notions that children are nearly immune to COVID and don’t need to be vaccinated have pervaded.

These ideas are wrong. People making such claims ignore the accumulating risk of long COVID, the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection, in children who may get infected once or twice a year. The condition may already have affected nearly six million kids in the U.S. Children need us to wake up to this serious threat. If we do, we can help our kids with a few straightforward and effective measures.

The spread of the mistaken idea that children have nothing to worry about has had some help from scientists. In 2023 the American Medical Association’s pediatrics journal published a study–which has since been retracted—reporting the rate of long COVID symptoms in kids was “strikingly low” at only 0.4 percent. The results were widely publicized as feel-good news, and helped rationalize the status quo, where kids are repeatedly exposed to SARS-COV-2 in underventilated schools and parents believe they will suffer no serious harm.

In January 2024, however, two scientists published a letter with me explaining why that study was invalid. Some of the errors made it hard to understand how the study survived peer review. For example, the authors claimed to report on long COVID using the 2021 World Health Organization definition, but didn’t properly account for the possibility of new onset and fluctuating or relapsing symptoms, even though that definition and the subsequently released 2023 pediatric one emphasize those attributes. Any child with four symptom-free weeks—even nonconsecutive ones—following confirmed infection was categorized by the study authors as not having long COVID.

In August, the authors of the study retracted it. They did not admit to the errors we raised. But they did admit to new errors, and said these mistakes meant they understated the rate of affected children.

And that rate, according to other research, is quite high. The American Medical Association’s top journal, JAMA, in August, published a key new study and editorial about pediatric long COVID. The editorial cites several robust analyses and concludes that, while uncertainty remains, long COVID symptoms appear to occur after about 10 percent to 20 percent of pediatric infections.

If you’re keeping score, that’s as many as 5.8 million affected children in the U.S.—so far. And we know studies and surveys of adults have found that repeat infections heighten the risk of long-term consequences.

The JAMA study comparing infected and uninfected children found that trouble with memory or focusing is the most common long COVID symptom in kids aged six to 11. Back, neck, stomach, and head pain were the next most common symptoms. Other behavioral impacts included “fear about specific things” and refusal to go to school.

Adolescents aged 12 to 17 reported different leading symptoms. Change or loss in smell or taste was most common, followed by body pains, daytime tiredness, low energy, tiredness after walking, and cognitive deficits. The study noted that symptoms “affected almost every organ system.” In other words, these symptoms reflect real physiological trauma. For example, SARS-COV-2 can cause or mediate cardiovascular, neurological, and immunological harm, even increasing the relative risk of new onset pediatric diabetes when compared with other lesser infections.

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Fifteen years ago, cosmologists were flying high. The simple but wildly successful “standard model of cosmology” could, with just a few ingredients, account for a lot of what we see in the universe. It seemed to explain the distribution of galaxies in space today, the accelerated expansion of the universe, and the fluctuations in the brightness of the relic glow from the big bang—called the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—based on a handful of numbers fed into the model. Sure, it contained some unexplained exotic features, such as dark matter and dark energy, but otherwise everything held together. Cosmologists were (relatively) happy.

Over the past decade, though, a pesky inconsistency has arisen, one that defies easy explanation and may portend significant breaks from the standard model. The problem lies with the question of how fast space is growing. When astronomers measure this expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant, by observing supernovae in the nearby universe, their result disagrees with the rate given by the standard model.

This “Hubble tension” was first noted more than 10 years ago, but it was not clear then whether the discrepancy was real or the result of measurement error. With time, however, the inconsistency has become more firmly entrenched, and it now represents a major thorn in the side of an otherwise capable model. The latest data, from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), have made the problem worse.

The two of us have been deeply involved in this saga. One (Riess) is an observer and co-discoverer of dark energy, one of the last pieces of the standard cosmological model. He has also spearheaded efforts to determine the Hubble constant by observing the local universe. The other (Kamionkowski) is a theorist who helped to figure out how to calculate the Hubble constant by measuring the CMB. More recently he helped to develop one of the most promising ideas to explain the discrepancy—a notion called early dark energy.

One possibility is that the Hubble tension is telling us the baby universe was expanding faster than we think. Early dark energy posits that this extra expansion might have resulted from an additional repulsive force that was pushing against space at the time and has since died out.

This suggestion is finally facing real-world tests, as experiments are just now becoming capable of measuring the kinds of signals early dark energy might have produced. So far the results are mixed. But as new data come in over the next few years, we should learn more about whether the expansion of the cosmos is diverging from our predictions and possibly why.

The idea that the universe is expanding at all came as a surprise in 1929, when Edwin Hubble used the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, Calif., to show that galaxies are all moving apart from one another. At the time, many scientists, including Albert Einstein, favored the idea of a static universe. But the separating galaxies showed that space is swelling ever larger.

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Chris Gash

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Getty Images The Online Safety Act, which aims to make the internet safer for children, became law just under a year ago in October 2023

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It’s September 2024, and a group of American thalidomide survivors and their family members arrive in Washington, D.C., to lobby the government for support. More than 60 years have gone by since Food and Drug Administration medical examiner Frances Oldham Kelsey first stalled the new drug application for thalidomide from the pharmaceutical company Richardson-Merrell.

Although she stopped the drug from going on the market in the U.S., thousands of pregnant people still took thalidomide in Merrell’s so-called clinical trials, and many had babies with shortened limbs and other serious medical conditions. Others had miscarriages or stillborn babies. Here we look at the legacy of thalidomide, the changes in drug regulations in the wake of the scandal, and what happened to our hero, Frances Kelsey.

Katie Hafner: I’m Katie Hafner, and this is the final chapter of The Devil in the Details, a special season from “Lost Women of Science.” It’s about Frances Oldham Kelsey, the doctor who said no to the thalidomide.

As we were working on this story, piecing together a complicated timeline that spanned years and oceans, there was something that kept nagging at me. It wasn’t huge, but it was something.

You know, we’ve talked so much about time — how much time was wasted before anyone figured out there was an epidemic of injured babies, yet more time before thalidomide was pulled from the market in Europe, and even more before the American public was warned about it.

For almost five years, women were taking this drug, thinking it was the safest thing in the world.

Well, there’s another little stretch of time that got me to wondering about that something I just mentioned. It starts in April 1962, when Helen Taussig alerts Frances Kelsey to just how bad the situation was in Europe, and it ends three months later in July 1962, when Americans finally get the message about thalidomide.

What was Frances Kelsey doing during those months? Did she just decide to trust that the drug company, William S. Merrell, had it covered? Of course not.

Jennifer Vanderbes: She starts just going to big hospitals that she has relationships with and asking, have you seen a spike in babies born with phocomelia?

Katie Hafner: Jennifer Vanderbes, the author of “Wonder Drug.”

Jennifer Vanderbes: The answer is yes, but we don’t think they’re connected to thalidomide. And that’s pretty much the answer she gets along the way. She gets really ticked off. There’s another hospital in Cincinnati, that she writes a memo, she says, you know, this is ridiculous, there’s reported five phocomelic births at this hospital, and they’re saying it’s not thalidomide.

Katie Hafner: But there was only so much she could do. Because don’t forget– Frances Kelsey reviewed drug applications; she didn’t run national investigations.

It was only when the FDA launched its official investigation that the agency finally dug into how far thalidomide had spread. And at first, it seemed like the U.S. really had dodged a bullet. On August 7, 1962, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare sent out a press release. A pretty optimistic one. It said that the FDA had already interviewed more than a thousand doctors who’d participated in the “clinical trials” and had determined that more than 15,000 people across the country had received thalidomide.

Katie Hafner: Of those, about one in five were women of childbearing age. But according to this press release, quote, “no abnormalities were observed in the offspring of these patients.”

Frances herself offered a similar message when she was interviewed by the CBC a few days later.

Interviewer: In the experimental use of thalidomide in the United States, about how many people did take the drug?

Frances Kelsey: Uh, in the neighborhood of 15,000, I believe.

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Lisk Feng

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Florida has some protection from two upcoming tropical threats, but there is a chance that protection could waver as the month progresses.

ByAlex Sosnowski, AccuWeather senior meteorologist

Despite an influx of cooler and less humid air across the southeastern United States, Florida remains at risk for tropical threats as AccuWeather meteorologists continue to monitor multiple potential developments.

Approximately six weeks remain in the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 through Nov. 30, and the tropics continue to remain active.

AccuWeather meteorologists have called out two main areas that are most likely to spur tropical development in the next few days to a week or so, and one feature could still find a way to impact Florida.

Western Caribbean feature to push into Central America

An area of showers and thunderstorms continues to grow over Central America in response to a gyre, a large and slowly rotating area of low pressure. This very weak storm could spur development in the western Caribbean or the eastern Pacific in the coming days.

“Based on the latest information we have and studying the situation, the most likely path the brewing feature in the western Caribbean would take would be a more southern one into Central America this weekend,” AccuWeather Lead Hurricane Expert Alex DaSilva said.

The northward path of this feature is currently blocked and should stay blocked,” DaSilva added.

Some of the same energy from the Caribbean system may survive into the eastern Pacific.

The same gyre could spur new development in the eastern Pacific, which then could become a threat for areas farther to the north along the coast of Mexico next week.

Tropical Rainstorm approaching the Leewards

The western Caribbean zone is not the only area that could give birth to a tropical storm.

“We have been tracking a wave of low pressure (tropical wave) that moved off the coast of Africa earlier this month,” DaSilva said, “This feature has been showing some signs of life off and on in recent days but could be entering a much more favorable area for tropical development this week as it nears the Leeward Islands in the northeastern Caribbean.”

Between Friday and Sunday, the Atlantic feature will have conditions conducive to further organization, including low wind shear and warm water. Because of the growing threat, AccuWeather meteorologists have begun referring to the feature as a tropical rainstorm to raise public awareness of the situation.

“It is possible for the feature to ramp up quickly to a tropical depression or tropical storm as its core approaches or passes near the Leewards late this week,” DaSilva said, “But, as this system travels farther to the west, whatever it becomes, could run into more hostile conditions for strengthening and organization.”

Like the conditions with the western Caribbean system, a path into Florida also appears to be blocked, but that could change over time depending on the position and strength of other weather features.

Natural deterrents for Florida, southeastern US?

There are two factors that could suppress any tropical feature that may develop and track toward Florida.

The first is the larger islands of the northern Caribbean, such as Puerto Rico and Hispaniola. The tall mountains could rip away at any system that tracks overhead. The other factor is a complex weather pattern, including the jet stream setup over the southern Atlantic Ocean, the eastern Gulf coast of the U.S., and over the Bahamas

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AccuWeather Lead Hurricane Expert Alex DaSilva tracks new threats of tropical development brewing in the Caribbean and the Atlantic as of Oct. 15, as well as the regions at risk of these storms.

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Look to the sky this week after sunset to catch a glimpse of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS as it swings past Earth for the first time in 80,000 years.

A bright comet has made a rare appearance in the sky, and skywatchers will have several opportunities to see it before it retreats into the icy depths of space.

Comet C/2023 A3, also known as Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, is visiting the inner solar system for the first time in 80,000 years and is putting on a show. It has become bright enough to see with the naked eye after sunset, and is expected to remain bright throughout the week.

Photographers have already captured stunning images of the comet, which is around the same brightness as Comet NEOWISE was during the summer of 2020.

How to see Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS will be visible in the western sky about 30 to 60 minutes after sunset. It will appear above and to the right of Venus, which will be easy to spot due to how bright it glows in the evening.

Each evening, the comet will appear slightly higher in the sky. However, it will also start to fade, so experts recommend looking for it after sunset before it becomes too dim to see without a telescope.

What is a comet?

Comets are frozen space rocks containing gas, dust, and ice that typically reside in the far reaches of our solar system.

“When a comet’s orbit brings it close to the sun, it heats up and spews dust and gases into a giant glowing head larger than most planets,” NASA explained on its website, “The dust and gases form a tail that stretches away from the sun for millions of miles.”

Halley’s Comet is one of the most well-known comets, which orbits the sun about once every 76 years. However, most comets take thousands of years to complete one orbit around the sun, such as Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS.

When will the next comet be visible?

Another comet, known as C/2024 S1 (ATLAS), was recently discovered and has the potential to put on a grand display in the morning sky around the end of October and the start of November. However, it is far from a guarantee.

According to EarthSky, Comet S1 comet might be breaking apart as it approaches the sun. “After its close encounter with the sun (if it survived) it could put on a fantastic show for the Northern Hemisphere in the morning skies,” EarthSky explained.

Astronomers will have a better idea later this month on how bright the new comet may get in the sky.

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Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS

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