Month: December 2015

Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations, at the agency's headquarters in 2013.

NASA has flown the International Space Station for the last 15 years, and during that time it has offered private industry a pretty sweet deal. The space agency pays transportation costs to and from the station for experiments and provides astronaut time to tend to that research. And when NASA needed new spacecraft to get its astronauts on board the station, it paid private companies to develop their own vehicles for that purpose. NASA, in some sense, has become the Chamber of Commerce for outer space.

But all good things must come to an end, so the free ride in low Earth orbit for private industry may stop as soon as a decade from now. “We’re going to get out of ISS as quickly as we can,” said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s chief of human spaceflight, last week. “Whether it gets filled in by the private sector or not, NASA’s vision is we’re trying to move out.”

Gerstenmaier made those comments during a meeting of NASA’s advisory council in early December at Johnson Space Center, which Ars attended. The comments are striking because, while the remarks reflect NASA’s desire to see US commercial industries thrive in the space around Earth, it is not the agency’s top priority to ensure that happens. Gerstenmaier said NASA is committed to moving humans deeper into space to the vicinity of the Moon, an area known as cislunar space.

Way back in 2014, Firefox rolled out an unpopular feature to its nightly builds: sponsored tiles on its "new tab" page. The feature, which was opt-in by default, showed ads that were based on your browsing history. Eventually, after a very long beta testing period, the sponsored tiles were loosed upon all 500 million-or-so Firefox users in May this year.

Now, just a few months later, the feature is being retired. Sponsored tiles will continue to appear for the next few months while Mozilla "fulfils its commitments" (i.e. clears out ad inventory), but then they'll be gone entirely. Writing on the official Mozilla blog, vice president Darren Herman explains that, "advertising in Firefox could be a great business, but it isn’t the right business for us at this time because we want to focus on core experiences for our users."

An example of a sponsored tile in Firefox.

Later in the blog post, which was probably published on Friday afternoon in an attempt to dodge the news cycle, Herman repeats the refrain that we've heard many times over the last few years: "We believe that the advertising ecosystem needs to do better ... Mozilla will continue to explore ways to bring a better balance to the advertising ecosystem for everyone’s benefit, and to build successful products that respect user privacy and deliver experiences based upon transparency, choice and control."

Thirteen percent of newborns with congenital heart disease (CHD) also have congenital abnormalities that don't affect the heart. This is twice the rate at which they appear in newborns without heart problems. Infants with CHD are also at an increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders later in life, like motor, social, language, and cognitive impairments.

These elevated risks were thought to be caused by poor circulation during gestation or the stresses imposed by postnatal therapies. But a new study suggests that both types of abnormality are actually due to mutations in genes highly expressed in the developing heart and brain. Results are published in Science.

Researchers looked at the protein-coding DNA (called the exome) of 1,213 babies with CHD and their unaffected parents. The results were compared to 900 control babies and parents. They looked for new mutations that appeared only in babies with CHD, babies with CHD accompanied by extracardiac congenital abnormalities, babies with CHD and neurodevelopmental disabilities, or both.

According to leaked documents from the Ministry of Interior the French government is considering two new pieces of legislation: a ban on free and shared Wi-Fi connections during a state of emergency, and measures to block Tor being used inside France.

The documents were seen by the French newspaper Le Monde. According to the paper, the new bills could be presented to parliament as soon as January 2016. The new laws are presumably in response to the attacks in Paris last month where 130 people were murdered.

The first piece of proposed legislation, according to Le Monde, would forbid free and shared Wi-Fi during a state of emergency. The new measure is justified by way of a police opinion, saying that it's tough to track people who use public hotspots.

Video by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Update: It's New Year's eve and Ars staffers are enjoying a winter break (inevitably filled with some joy rides and whatever that choose-your-own Black Mirror thing is). As such, we're resurfacing a few favorites from the site archives appropriate for the occasion—like this tour of a facility that will inevitably be busy post-holidays. Our story on the Sims Municipal Recycling Center originally ran on December 7, 2015, and it appears unchanged below.

BROOKLYN, New York—A conveyor belt is keeping material flying past at speeds that require both concentration and rapid eye movement if you wanted to track a single item. Above the constant roar of all the heavy equipment, it's just possible to make out the brief hissing of jets of high-pressure air. Those jets are produced where the conveyor belt ends, and most of the material plunges onto a second belt below. Each hiss, however, causes a carefully chosen item to leap off the end of the belt and soar into a different collection area, where yet another conveyor belt takes it on its way.

The process of carefully choosing which items to sift out is all done without human intervention. It's based on how that object reflects light that's outside the range of human vision.