Month: January 2016

Astronaut Karen Nyberg gazes out of the International Space Station's cupola. A company, NanoRacks, wants to add a commercial airlock to the same module. (credit: NASA)

When NASA engineers designed the International Space Station during the 1990s, they didn’t envision the orbital outpost becoming a hub of commercial activity; nevertheless, that has become one of the most important contributions of ISS to US spaceflight. And as it nurtures American enterprise in low-Earth orbit, the station is increasingly running into a bottleneck: getting scientific research and other payloads outside.

Now a Texas company, NanoRacks, has proposed a solution. It is offering to build an airlock that will be attached to the space station and provide the capability to deploy cubesats and larger satellites. The $12 million-15 million airlock would also allow NASA to bring in costly large pumps and storage tanks for repairs, rather than disposing of them.

“We developed a commercial pathway to the station, and now we want to extend that pathway outside the station,” Jeff Manber, the company’s managing director, told Ars in an interview. “This is a sign that we believe in the future of the station.”

Evolve is an asymmetrical multiplayer game where a team of hunters chase down a monster. It was made by the hugely talented Left 4 Dead developers over six years before being released early in 2015, and I thought it was great. But publisher 2K, so convinced of the game's quality, put in place various DLC packages and pre-order bonuses to milk what it expected to be an enormous community. The perception took hold that Evolve was ripping off players—who had to buy the "core" game first—and it failed to sell in anything like the numbers expected. Now it's dead.

Rainbow Six: Siege walks a dangerously similar path.

Launched just before Christmas in the kind of primetime slot that with hindsight so often looks like a graveyard, Ubisoft anticipated that Siege would achieve lifetime sales of over seven million copies. For many reasons, however, Siege has thus far failed to make a commercial impact. The tragedy is that Siege offers something new and unique in the stalest of genres, the mainstream FPS. At one point it even looked like it might usurp the greats of the competitive shooter world. What's stopped it? Ubisoft.

A chimp in Leipzig Zoo contemplates its mutation rate. (credit: Thomas Lersch)

Genetic evidence is an incredibly useful tool for understanding evolutionary history. It has helped us build up our current picture of how humans migrated out of Africa, and also estimate when chimps and humans parted ways from our last common ancestor.

Estimates that used different methods have placed the chimp-human split anywhere from 3 million to 10 million years ago (mya), sometimes falling far from the estimated 6-7 mya suggested by the fossil record—an indication that something is wrong in the calculations. But as researchers improve their techniques, the estimates are revised over and over again, each time hopefully getting closer to real picture.

Having the dates provided by the fossil record match the genetic evidence would help us to be more sure of our understanding, so it’s important to try to work out where the mismatch is and why it’s happening. Two researchers at Columbia University, Guy Amster and Guy Sella, have suggested an important factor that has been missing: the timing of life events like puberty and reproduction, and their effects on genetics. By building these factors into their calculations, they’ve come up with an estimate for the split that more closely matches the fossil records—around 6 mya.