Month: January 2016

Did a piece of the Lunar Prospector fly around in space for 17 years before crashing back into Earth? (credit: NASA)

In November, an approximately 1-meter piece of space junk burnt up in the Earth's atmosphere and fell into the Indian Ocean, making a fiery spectacle of itself. At the time space scientists weren't sure about the origin of the object, named WT1190F. Since then, there has been a flurry of activity to try and trace the trajectory of the debris back to its origin.

Now according to a report in Nature, scientists have a leading candidate. The space debris appears likely to have come from the translunar injector of Lunar Prospector, a spacecraft launched by NASA in 1998. This part of the rocket would have boosted the spacecraft out of Earth orbit and toward the Moon.

By comparing observations from telescopes since 2009, scientists found the object had a stretched out path that brought it beyond the Moon's orbit, which was consistent with a Moon rocket. They believe the object only could have survived in the Earth-Moon system for a decade or slightly longer. Additionally, spectra from the debris showed the presence of titanium oxide and hydrogen, which were consistent with the injector's titanium case.

Razer isn't slowing down, even after releasing a slew of products at last week's CES. The company announced a huge sale on all of its peripherals—50 percent off—for one day only, starting at 6PM PST on January 14.

There are a few rules you'll need to stick to if you want to buy stuff: the sale is limited to one item per customer, and only Razer Insiders can participate. If you're not already a member of the Razer community, you can sign up for an account at any point (and Razer even gives you step-by-step instructions on how to do so). Razer also has a handy micro-site with countdowns to the sale for different time zones, just in case you have a hard time deciphering when you can start buying.

Unfortunately, the sale is on peripherals only—Razer mice, keyboards, headphones and other accessories. Razer systems are excluded from the deal. So no, you can't get the new Blade Stealth gaming ultrabook for half price. Nevertheless, it's a great sale if you're in the market for a new gaming mouse or glowing keyboard.

During this week's State of the Union address, President Obama announced that his Vice President Joe Biden will lead a new science "moonshot" to put an end to cancer. According to an article on Medium posted by the Vice President, this will do two things: increase resources devoted to fighting cancer and break down barriers that prevent sharing of information among cancer researchers.

The announcement drew a lot of praise from pundits—the snarkier Twitter commentators out there pointed out that Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) failed to clap at this, marking him as heartless. More funding for cancer research sounds like a total no-brainer, doesn't it? There's just one problem—it's a terrible idea.

At this point, let me give you a little background on where this editorial is coming from. It might be hard to understand why the car editor at a technology website is whining about science funding, but before moving to Ars full-time in June last year, I spent six years working in a policy office at the National Institutes of Health. It's a job that gave me a front row seat into how science policy actually works in the United States. Before that, I spent another six years as a research scientist, during which time I served in a couple of leadership roles with the National Postdoctoral Association (I also used to write science content for Ars, starting back in 2004).

Seagate, after a slightly embarrassing pause, has launched a 10-terabyte helium-filled enterprise-class 3.5-inch hard drive. The drives aren't yet commercially available—they're being sampled to both Alibaba and Huawei at the moment—but they'll probably be around £600/$800 when they eventually arrive.

This 10TB drive marks Seagate's first foray into helium-filled storage devices. The company's primary competitor, Western Digital/HGST, has been selling helium-filled drives since 2013.

While HGST was more than happy to share lots of details about its hermetically sealed helium-filled hard drives, Seagate, rather annoyingly, has only sent us a vague press release. Seagate's 10TB drive has seven platters—the same number as the 10TB HGST drive—and 14 heads. There's no word on spindle speed, but it's probably 7200RPM. The press release says that the new Seagate drive uses the company's PowerChoice tech to reduce power consumption, but falls short of actually providing some numbers. There are two versions of the drive: one with a 6Gb/s SATA interface, another with 12Gb/s SAS.