HUZHOU, China--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 20, 2023--

Elon Musk has cut staff from the X team that combats election disinformation claiming they were actually “undermining election integrity.” The platform, formerly known as Twitter, got rid of half of the global team, including four people at its Dublin office and its head, sources told The Information. Mr Musk later confirmed the move on X, stating: “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.” With the 2024 US presidential election just over a year away, the team may now have only six staff members, most of them in North America, reported The Messenger. The Independent has reached out to the platform for comment on the cuts and received a message back stating, “Busy now, please check back later.” The move comes less than a month after the company announced in a blog post that it was “expanding” its “safety and elections teams to focus on combating manipulation, surfacing inauthentic accounts and closely monitoring the platform for emerging threats.” CEO Linda Yaccarino recently told The Financial Times that the platform was aiming to expand its elections and trust and safety teams. Mr Musk slashed the company’s workforce when he completed his $44bn purchase of the company, which he had repeatedly tried to back out of. In February The New York Times reported that the company had gone from 7,500 employees to fewer than 2,000 following repeated rounds of job cuts. The cuts included many from its trust and safety team, as well as senior executives in that area, such as Yoel Roth and Ella Irwin. Mr Roth, the former head of trust and safety, wrote a guest essay for the newspaper in which he revealed that following online attacks from Mr Musk and Donald Trump he has been forced to live with armed security guards outside his home and had to go into hiding for months. Read More Elon Musk to live stream himself doing ‘silly stuff’ on X Woman claiming to be Elon Musk’s wife arrested for trespassing at SpaceX plant in Texas Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claps back at Elon Musk for calling her ‘not that smart’ Musk confirms he is cutting election integrity staff from X/Twitter ahead of 2024 Woman claiming to be Elon Musk’s wife arrested at SpaceX site in Texas At US Antarctic base hit by harassment claims, workers are banned from buying alcohol at bars

An actor best known for his roles on “CSI: NY” and “The Good Doctor” will run for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat and challenge U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin for the Democratic nomination

Minuscule traces of metal from space junk that's designed to be disposable are invisibly polluting the Earth's atmosphere, a new study has found. In recent times, spacecrafts launched into space have been designed so that they fall out of orbit and fall back down to Earth after their intended use. So instead of the materials crashing on land, they can burn up in the upper atmosphere. Although the debris of rockets and satellites burn up when re-entering the planet's atmosphere, the consequences of metal vapour being left behind currently remain unknown. But given the amount of space exploration taking place, the amount of metal vapour is expected to rise in the years to come. Physicist Daniel Murphy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has led a team of researchers to investigate what effects this metal vapour could have as well as its impact over time and this study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as per Science Alert. He listed "iron, silicon, and magnesium from the natural meteoric source" as the current refractory material in stratospheric particular. Murphy has warned how this composition could be affected by the metal vapour from space junk. "However, the amount of material from the reentry of upper-stage rockets and satellites is projected to increase dramatically in the next 10 to 30 years," he wrote. "As a result, the amount of aluminum in stratospheric sulfuric acid particles is expected to become comparable to or even exceed the amount of meteoric iron, with unknown consequences for inclusions and ice nucleation." To find out if metal vapour remained, Murphy and his team took and analyzed 500,000 stratospheric aerosol droplet samples to see if they had traces of spacecraft metals. Aerosols contain sulfuric acid droplets made from the oxidation of the carbonyl sulfide gas and in the atmosphere, this can appear naturally or as a pollutant. Metal and silicon traces can be found in these droplets too, acquired from meteors which vaporize upon atmospheric entry. Around 20 metals were discovered from this research, and while some metals had similar ratios to the vaporizing meteors, other metals such as lithium, aluminium, copper, and lead exceeded the anticipated amounts. Particles from vaporized spacecraft were found in 10 per cent of stratospheric aerosols over a certain size while other common spacecraft metals such as niobium and hafnium were also present. Consequently, these traces of spacecraft particles could affect how water freezes into ice in the stratosphere, and stratospheric aerosol particles could change in size. Due to more space exploration planned in an "era of rapid growth" for the industry, the researchers predict "the percentage of stratospheric sulfuric acid particles that contain aluminum and other metals from satellite reentry will be comparable to the roughly 50 per cent that now contain meteoric metals." Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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